Minding your pleases and
thank-yous in Britain and the US
M. LY NNE M U RP H Y
Verbal manners don’t always travel well
Probably my favourite study of American/British
linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson’s (2002)
paper on no. The research was inspired by a
Dutch colleague’s suggestion that no can be used
as an acknowledgement token for a negative statement – that is, no can be used instead of ‘positive’
indicators like mm-hmm or yeah to indicate that the
listener has heard and understood a negative sentence like I didn’t see her. Jefferson’s first response
to this suggestion was: but English no can’t be an
emotionally neutral acknowledgement token. And
it turned out that she was right – but only for (her
native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87%
of the tokens in response to negative statements
were negative (usually no). In the American data,
that number was 27%. Americans use negative response tokens less because for them a no response
signals not just acknowledgement (‘I received your
message and understood it’), but affiliation –
communicating ‘I’d do the same thing’ or ‘I’m
with you on that’. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commit themselves
less often than they simply acknowledge what’s
been said. Here’s a slightly simplified version of
an example from Jefferson’s British data.1
(1) Marian: And I hadn’t seen her for ten years. =
Alice: =N[o
Marian: [.hhh And previous to that I hadn’t
seen her since 1949 =
Alice: =[No:
Marian: [.hhh So uh that’s once in 30 years
Alice: Ye::s
Alice says yes to acknowledge Marian’s positive
sentence and no to acknowledge her negative
ones. How would such a conversation be understood by an American, who is unaccustomed to
no as an acknowledgement token? It’s unlikely
that the thought will occur to them that a British
speaker is operating by different acknowledgement
rules. The rules are so subconscious that most people don’t realize they exist. Instead, the American
will have two possible ways to interpret a no in
that position: either it is rejecting the previous
statement or it is showing (possibly inappropriate)
emotional affiliation to it.
For me as an American in Britain, reading
Jefferson’s paper was a revelatory experience. I
thought: maybe more frequently hearing no helps
account for why I sometimes feel like English people are being relentlessly negative. To them, that no
was a bit of conversational support; to me, it could
feel like an attempt to rain on my parade.
It doesn’t take much exposure to another country’s English to notice the differences in meaning
for referential words. If someone offers you a biscuit, but gives you something you’d call a cookie,
you understand that biscuit means something different to them than it does to you. But nonreferential words like no, hello, thanks and please
M. LYNNE MURPHY is a
lexicologist and Reader in
Linguistics at the University
of Sussex. Her books include
Semantic Relations and the
Lexicon (Cambridge UP,
2003) and Lexical Meaning
(Cambridge UP, 2010).
Since 2006, she has written
the Separated by a Common
Language blog and currently holds a National
Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar
grant for the preparation of a popular-audience
book on the relationships between British and
American English. [email protected]
doi:10.1017/S0266078416000523
English Today 128, Vol. 32, No. 4 (December 2016). Printed in the United Kingdom
© 2016 Cambridge University Press
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are another matter. We may notice that other people say these words more or less than we do, but
it’s harder to figure out that they are not using
them for the same purpose as we would. And
that’s why ‘polite words’ like please, thanks,
sorry and pardon are a particular challenge for
transatlantic communication. The differences are
hard to pin down, and they have implications for
whether we’re considered polite in a conversation
or not. From there they have the potential to affect
stereotypes of whether people from one country or
another are ‘polite’ or ‘rude’, ‘obsequious’ or
‘brusque’, ‘attentive’ or ‘oblivious’.
Whole books could be written about any of these
words, but this article gives a quick tour of two:
thank you (or thanks) and please. These ‘polite’
words have communicative functions, rather than
referential meaning. To say thank you is to commit
the act of thanking. Say please in any utterance and
you commit a request; add it to an utterance that it
already a request and it marks something about
your intentions in making the request. At least,
that’s what these words purport to do. As we’ll
see below, the link between the words and these
acts is not always strong, and different dialects do
different things with these words.2
There is a general stereotype that the British use
‘polite’ words more than Americans do – but in the
case of thank you or thanks, that might not be true.
Search a linguistic corpus for thanks and thank you
and Americans come out as thanking twice as often
as the British (Biber et al., 1999). The British have
synonyms for thanks (cheers and ta) that are less
prevalent in the US, but even when these are
included in a corpus search for thanking acts,
there are still more American thanking acts than
British ones. On top of that, Americans use more
sentence-long thanking acts starting with I appreciate, I am grateful and I’d like to express my
appreciation/gratitude (in the GloWBE corpus,
Davies, 2013). More thanking corroborates the
view of mainstream American culture as more
solidarity-oriented than mainstream British (or at
least English) culture (Scollon & Scollon, 1981);
that is to say, the American system puts great emphasis on exchanges of ‘positive face’ (Brown &
Levinson, 1987) – creating and maintaining feelings of belonging and mutual appreciation in an
interaction. Tottie (2002) notes that a particularly
American kind of thanks is thanking someone for
their time – which often amounts to thanking
them for interacting with you.
People who’ve spent time in both British and
American shops might feel that these thanking
numbers are wrong. British shop interactions are
often teeming with thanks. I have observed a bankteller interaction with twelve exchanges of thanks,
and take-away coffee purchases with five are not
unusual. These don’t affect corpus numbers greatly
because most corpora include few of these types of
interactions. The British National Corpus (2007)
has a handful, and they include things like this:
(2) Shopkeeper: One eighty two. Thank you.
Customer: Say it again for me, Pam?
S: One eighty two.
C: Thank you. (pause) I haven’t got the two is
that alri–, are you alright for change?
S: Yes, yes. Thank you. (pause) Thanks very
much.
C: Thank you. Thanks very much.
S: Lovely, thank you.
(3) Shopkeeper: It’s one forty nine.
Customer: Thanks.
S: Thank you.
C: Thank you.
S: Thank you.
C: Thanks.
S: Bye-bye.
C: Bye.
Though the corpus doesn’t record what was happening non-verbally, it’s likely that at least some
of these thankings accompany movement of
objects. The customer puts a desired purchase on
the counter and says thank you. The assistant
takes it and says thank you. Thanks are uttered
when credit-card machines are handed back and
forth, when customers offer cash to the shop assistant or when they receive change. The English
Companion, a comedic guide to English life,
explains how to interpret the thank yous in a passenger–bus conductor exchange (back in the days
of bus conductors):
It takes four thank-yous for a ticket to be bought on
an English bus. First the bus conductor heaves in
sight and calls out thank-you (I have arrived). The
passenger then hands over his 30p with an answering
call of thank-you (I note that you have arrived and
here is my fare). The conductor then hands over the
ticket with another thank-you (I acknowledge receipt
of your fare and here is your ticket in return)
whereupon the passenger replies thank-you
(thank-you). (Smith, 1984: 233)
The sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1971: 69) remarked
upon this very British use of thanking tokens:
‘British “thank you” seems on its way to marking
formally the segments of certain interactions,
with only residual attachment to “thanking”’.
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Thus in British service encounters it often appears
that the reply to thank you is thank you. Thank you
in this case is used less as an expression of sincere
gratitude (people usually aren’t all that grateful to
accept or return a credit-card terminal) and more
as a culturally-sanctioned way of saying ‘I’ve
done my bit, it’s your turn to do the next thing’.
American service transactions, on the other hand,
tend to reserve thanks for the end of the transaction
and use other means of marking movement of
objects during the transaction.
Please is the word I’ve been studying lately,
inspired by a comment from dialect coach and
blogger Ben Trawick-Smith (2012):
while ‘thank you’ is still important to civilized discourse, I find that ‘please’ has almost the opposite
effect in American English. It can make a question
sound urgent, blunt, and even downright rude.
Until the past ten years or so, people studied
‘English please’ without much mention of which
English they were studying – and so they’d make
general statements about please being used in for
certain types of interactions in English. The results
were confusing. Some claimed that please is generally used when the request is a matter of routine
(Leech, 2014), and where imposition on the
requestee is minimal, as in service encounters
(House, 1989; Wichmann, 2004). Others provided
contrary evidence that please is only used where
the request was for something out of the ordinary
(Stross, 1964, cited in Ervin-Tripp, 1976), where
the requester and requestee differed in age or
rank (Ervin-Tripp, 1976), or where the situation
is relatively formal (e.g. in written office memos
rather than office speech, Pufahl Bax, 1986). The
difference between these two sets of findings is
that the first set were based on British data or experience, and the second on American.
Comparative research has found that American
requests have please about half as much as
British requests do (Breuer & Geluykens, 2007;
Murphy & De Felice, submitted). My work with
Rachele De Felice on requests in corporate email
has found qualitative differences that help to explain the quantitative differences. Americans tend
to use please at similar rates (20–30%) no matter
how minor or great an imposition the request
seeks to make. In contrast, British rates of please
usage vary by amount of imposition and are greatest where the request imposition was lowest – 65%
with a low-imposition request (e.g. Please forward
this to your colleagues) and 91% in request-type
items that are actually offers of a favour or
extensions of polite sentiments, as in Please let
me know if I can help or Please accept our congratulations. Contributing to the notion that please is
more ‘routine’ in British English, the British
requests were more formulaic than American
ones: 15% of British requests began with Can
you please, while only 3% of American ones did.
The lesser American use of please ties into the observation that please marks age or rank differences in
American English. Please won’t in this case be used
as much in requests among equals, and American
requests are often phrased as if the parties are
equal because ‘there is an implicit tendency to establish an atmosphere of equality’ in interactions
(Stewart & Bennett, 1991: 89). This helps explain
why please sometimes sounds impolite to
Americans. If please presupposes a difference in
rank, then it contradicts the belief that we are all
equal. If the difference in rank is assumed to be in
the requester’s favour, then please can make a request sound bossier. If it the difference is assumed
to be favouring the addressee, then please can
sound as if the requester is subordinating themselves.
I feel this ‘subordination’ particularly keenly
when British speakers preface interrogative
requests with please, as in Please could we meet
on Tuesday? instead of putting it in the usual medial position (could we please meet) or sentencefinally. This is not the most common position for
please in a question in British English, but it is a
possible place. In American English questioninitial please is practically non-existent. When I receive please-fronted interrogative requests from
the British office staff in my department, they
sound to American me like a child begging a
grown-up for something. That makes Americanme uncomfortable, as it sounds (to me, probably
not to them) like the requester is putting me on a
pedestal and possibly afraid of me.
Using or not-using please where expected may
affect the outcome of your interaction. Looking at
whether people complied with requests with and
without please, a group of psychologists found
that their American subjects were less likely to
comply with a low-imposition request (pledging
to buy a 50-cent cookie for charity at a future
date) if it had please (Firmin et al., 2004), but
more likely to comply with a high-imposition request (helping an exam cheater) if it did have
please (Vaughn et al., 2009). Equivalent research
has not been done in the UK, but what we know
about please in the two countries suggests that
the outcome might be different.
In another study (Murphy, 2015), I’ve investigated the interjection please in the GloWBE corpus
MIND ING YOU R PLEASES AN D THAN K-YO US IN B RITAIN AND THE US
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of internet language. Unlike in the previous studies, I found roughly equivalent numbers of please
on American and British websites. The key here
was that, unlike the studies cited above, I searched
for the interjection please itself, rather than studying requests and whether or not they include
please. Just as thank you doesn’t always sincerely
communicate gratitude, please need not always
communicate a polite request. Categorizing the
uses of please in the two countries’ data, I found
that both used please for sincere requests (Please,
please, please begin carrying gluten-free sandwich
options), requests that were implicitly advice
( please leave him!) and sincere or mock prayers
(Please no injuries for Arsenal this weekend). As
can be expected from the earlier studies, British
sites used please more often for pseudo-requests
that involved no real imposition on the addressee:
instructions (Please click here for details) and information (Please note there are no Park and
Ride services). American sites were more likely
to have uses of please that were aggressive or
rude, for instance ‘requests’ that are really admonitions (Please don’t quote scripture if you don’t
know what you’re talking about) and use of the dismissive oh, please (Oh, please, any Christian who
had promised to bring the troops home would have
done so by now). Again, these differences between
British and American please can be associated with
the British tendency to use please to routinely mark
low-imposition requests and the American tendency to use please in asymmetrical social
relationships.
Please and thank you are just two non-referential
words whose use differs subtly but noticeably in
American and British English. The different ways
in which they are used gives some credence to
Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1840 observation that
‘[American] manners are neither so tutored nor
so uniform, but they are frequently more sincere’
than British manners. I don’t mean to claim that
British speakers are insincere, just that please and
thank you are more often used in British English
as a matter of routine, rather than to soften an imposition or show gratitude.
I haven’t the space to discuss sorry, which is
used about four times more in British as
American English (Biber et al., 1999: 1098), but
I’ll end with a brief anecdote about it: I knew I’d
become Britified when a stranger held an elevator
door for me and I said a British sorry instead of
an American thank you.
This is the last of my series of four articles for
English Today, though I hope to contribute new research to the journal in future. If you have found
my reflections on American and British English
interesting, I invite you to join the discussion at
my blog, Separated by a Common Language
(Murphy, 2006–).
Notes
1 I have removed some of the conversation analysis
notation from the example. That which remains can
be interpreted as follows:
=
[
:
.hhh
interruption that does not alter the other
speaker’s flow of speech
simultaneous speech
lengthened pronunciation
audible inhalation
2 As ever in this series, I’m considering national differences in usage, because corpus data can show robust
differences at this level. It is reasonable to suspect regional differences within the countries as well.
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