Kiitos and pliis: The relationship of native and borrowed politeness markers in Finnish

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the use of the native Finnishpoliteness marker kiitos ‘thank you/please’ compared to the borrowed politenessmarker pliis (from English please). Pliis in Finnish is best characterized asa marked form which is mostly relegated to informal or spoken language. Thus,this stage of our study made use of a grammatical acceptability test to try toobserve social evaluation patterns. The test was presented as a web-based surveyconsisting of 12 grammatical acceptability questions and 6 demographicquestions. It was completed by 417 respondents from throughout Finland. Thehypothesis was that the function of kiitos could be changing grammatically andsemantically. However, the findings indicate that the use of kiitos is more orless unchanged, whereas the use of pliis is likely to be nativizing. The MANOVAanalyses indicate that pliis is associated (as a first order index) with young,urban women, and this is also the social group that is more likely to claim useof pliis. The most important finding of the study is that pliis and kiitos seem tobe complementary in their distribution; grammatically, pragmatically and interms of social distinctiveness. We claim that kiitos serves as a marker of negativepoliteness, whereas pliis serves as a marker of positive politeness.