Could You Turn on the Light Please? (Using Introductory Word Please in Indirect Questions and Requests)

The article is aimed at explaining the reasons why the introductory word please began to be used quite often as a part of indirectly expressed questions and requests in the modern Russian everyday speech. From the point of view of the Russian language norm, such construction is incorrect due to its redundancy: the semantics of the request here is expressed, on the one hand, implicitly, using an indirect speech act, and on the other hand, explicitly, through the introductory word please. As the article shows, the modern tendency towards non-normative use of the word please can be explained by the continuously increasing since the end of the 19th century heterogeneity of the Russian linguistic community. Due to the process of internal migration of the Russian population, which began during the period of industrialization of Russia, as well as due to the steadily expanding use of remote means of mass communication (radio, television, Internet) in recent decades, many Russian speakers have developed a need to take into account that the knowledge of their recipients may not completely coincide with their own knowledge. This entails the desire, as far as possible, to reduce the use of implicit means of expressing meanings and give preference to explicit means. Since the semantics of the request, idiomatically expressed by the entire structure of the sentence, may not be understood by an uninformed addressee, the sentence additionally includes an excessive explicit indicator of the request - the word please.

Russian everyday speech, indirect speech acts, questions, requests, introductory word please, idiomaticity, non-idiomaticity, analyticism, heterogeneity of the language community, language norm