13 - A Place for pliis in Finnish

Summary

This study offers a discourse–pragmatic variationist overview of the use of pliis ’please’ in Finnish requests, making use of two different sets of computer–mediated communication (CMC) data. The aim of the chapter is to elucidate previous findings, which suggest that, unlike the heritage lexical politeness marker kiitos, pliis is preferred in a clause–internal position. This finding raises questions about the nativization process and penetrability of the clause in remote language contact settings. As such, our study addresses a challenge of discourse–pragmatic variation studies: accountability when dealing with linguistic variables that are by definition functionally ambiguous. Thus, we underscore the need for especially discourse–pragmatic studies to make use of multiple datasets, even when addressing what appears to be a straightforward question. Second, the chapter also has the benefit of contributing to the overall knowledge of requests in Finnish, about which there is relatively little quantitative research.