“Pray, Sir, Proceed”

Abstract 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 o