On the development of Hebrew (im)polite bevakasha (please): A case of pragmatic expansion

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to examine the Hebrew (im)politeness marker bevakasha ‘please’ (the prefixed preposition bϵ ‘in’ + the noun bakasha ‘request’) in order to account for its present-day polysemy. The analysis of bevakasha, a hitherto neglected marker by both synchronic and diachronic investigations, is based in this article on corpora documenting the various stages of the Hebrew language. The findings illustrate a change in the contexts in which the marker has been used throughout history, i.e. from religious texts and letters of authoritative ruling to secular, casual contexts, from authoritative to egalitarian relationships, from first person to second- and third-person's benefits and further to argumentative contexts. The article concludes that the change in contexts has led to pragmatic expansion and a reanalysis of the marker which gave rise to the meaning of (im)politeness and to a shift in the power balance between the speaker and the addressee. Furthermore, the study suggests that the grammaticalization path of bevakasha has been motivated by a changing orientation towards the various components of the speech act, i.e. speaker, hearer and discourse.