Thank you, sorry and please: English politeness markers in Polish

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the use of the English politeness markers thankyou,sorryand pleasein 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. Previ-ous 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 sorryin 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 alein 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.