The functional domain of communicative relations comprises, among many others, the speech acts of asking (in the sense of begging) and thanking. First of all, like many other speech acts adduced in the literature like baptizing or blessing, these, too, are culture bound. There are speech communities, e.g. Amerindian ones, in which asking and thanking are no speech acts for which the functional domain of communicative relations would provide any dedicated means. Many communicative acts in a society may be executed without recourse to language. Even in our societies, one may thank somebody by sending him a bunch of flowers.

The following table lists some words conventionally used in various European languages for asking and thanking together with their full sentential forms. The latter constructions are illustrated with the familiar form of address in those languages which distinguish familiar and polite second person pronouns.

The reduced forms are conventional in the speech communities. They have a distribution similar to interjections; we will come to the details. The full forms have different status in the languages, as follows:

• The English full form underlying the word please is obviously a loan translation from French, but now no longer used. The full form of thanking is in frequent use.
• In German, the two full forms are often used.
• In Italian, the full form of asking is often used; the full form of thanking is no longer used.
• In Portuguese, the full form for asking is often used; the full form of thanking is totally obsolete.
• In French, the full form for asking cannot even be shortened. The full form of thanking quoted looks as if it were current, but its current use actually substantivizes the particle merci. A homonymous expression does underlie, historically, the modern particle merci, but in quite a different sense, viz. ‘that is a big favor’.

The full forms underlying these particles are complete clauses. They are even sentences, with the exception of the English, Portuguese and French forms of asking. These are conditional clauses which bind the request to the condition that the hearer agrees and are used as sentences by insubordination. The sentences coding a request make the illocutionary force of requesting explicit. These are, thus, performative utterances. The sentences spelling out the thanks in English, German and Italian likewise constitute performative utterances making their illocutionary force explicit. The Portuguese thanking sentence asserts that the speaker is grateful, while the French sentence asserts that he categorizes the interlocutor's prior act as something to be grateful for.

The net result of this very cursory analysis is the following: All of the contemporary particles of requesting and thanking in these languages are eroded forms of clauses used as sentences. All of these either code explicitly the speech act being performed or mention a proposition which implies the speech act or at least the attitude underlying it. In other words, all of these are conventional phrases belonging to a functional domain, viz. the domain of communicative relations, which provides an interface to pragmatics.

Now these clauses are shortened to one word which functions, at least initially, like an interjection. The process leading there is one of lexicalization. The illocutionary force and, thus, the relation to pragmatics remains unchanged by this process. These signs do not take on any functions in the interface with pragmatics that they did not have before; let alone that they were transferred into pragmatics. What changes is the emphasis on the performative act.

The thanking interjections just constitute a sentence. The requesting particles, instead, combine with another clause which codes the request. Now here we observe incipient grammaticalization. The request itself can take the form of an imperative or of an interrogative sentence. The English, German and Italian words for ‘please’ can introduce this sentence, follow it or even be inserted in it at a suitable syntactic boundary. In this respect, these interjections are underway to the status of a more integrated particle, like a modal adverb. German is maybe furthest advanced in this respect as it can use the word bitte even in declarative clauses ().

In this use, the sentence codes a situation which the speaker regards as desirable, implying at the same time that the hearer should cooperate in realizing the situation or keeping it true. One may be tempted to speak of grammaticalization of the particle in this sense. However, most of the parameters of grammaticalization do not apply. In particular, there is no paradigm and no enhanced obligatoriness.

This section thus shows that a set of performative particles may be formed by erosion which require neither the concept of grammaticalization nor the concept of pragmaticalization for an adequate description.

Reference

Ackermann, Tanja 2023, ‘Die formale und funktionale Entwicklung von bitte: Eine diachrone Korpusstudie zur Entstehung eines höflichkeitsrelevanten Markers’. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 51: 152-195.