“Pray, Sir, Proceed”

Requests are speech acts that ask somebody to do something that they might not have done without being asked. They impose on the addressee. In Present-day English, a range of linguistic devices are often used to make this imposition more palatable, such as questions about the addressee’s willingness or ability to carry out the required action and the use of the courtesy request marker please. However, this form of non-imposition politeness is relatively recent. In this paper, I focus on the politeness of requests before the onset of non-imposition politeness (i.e., in the eighteenth century). In the data consisting of the four-million word Corpus of Long Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novels (epicol18), polite requests rely on what I call “supplication politeness” rather than “non-imposition politeness”. They regularly use a format that includes a performative speech act verb, such as “I beg you…”, “I beseech you…” or “I entreat you…”. The courtesy request marker of choice was pray, a grammaticalised version of I pray you. Both of these elements frame the speaker in the role of a supplicant begging the addressee to do something rather than as an advice giver inquiring after the addressee’s willingness or ability to do it.