Thank you, sorry and please: English politeness markers in Polish
Katarzyna Lach Mirghani
University of Białystok, PolandKatarzyna Lach Mirghani is a PhD student of Linguistics at the University of Białystok, Poland. Her research interests include cognitive linguistics, computational linguistics and pragmatics. Her current research focuses on inter- and cross-cultural pragmatics and inclusivity in language.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3651-0825
Abstract
The aim of this study is to analyse the use of the English politeness markers thank you, sorry and
please in Polish.My initial hypothesis was that the politeness markers have already been incorporated into
the mental lexicon of Polish speakers, and are thus understood and accepted by them, but they do not have
the prospect of replacing their Polish equivalents because they lack the necessary pragmatic force. Previous
studies (Terkourafi 2011; Peterson &Vaattovaara 2014) show that pragmatic borrowings are unlikely to
do so. However, this corpus study finds a context in which a borrowing is used increasingly, namely sorry
in the collocation with ale (ʻbutʼ). It seems to have started replacing its Polish equivalents in this context,
as it constitutes 25% of all collocations of apologetic behaviour with ale in the National Corpus of Polish.
However, the majority of the occurrences of the analysed politeness markers in the corpus are restricted
to Internet-mediated communication.
Keywords:
linguistic politeness, pragmatic borrowings, politeness markers, thank you, sorry, pleaseReferences
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University of Białystok, Poland
Katarzyna Lach Mirghani is a PhD student of Linguistics at the University of Białystok, Poland. Her research interests include cognitive linguistics, computational linguistics and pragmatics. Her current research focuses on inter- and cross-cultural pragmatics and inclusivity in language.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3651-0825
