Beyond politeness: a corpus study of Spanish por favor

This collection contains a corpus of contemporary Spanish dialogues compiled for the project "Beyond politeness", where we investigate the use of the politeness marker por favor ‘please’ (hereinafter, PF) . The items in our corpus are extracted from dialogues in screenplays and novels, a list of which is provided here as well. We analyzed various features of each occurrence of PF (the placement in the sentence, how it was use in the interaction, etc.) in order to disentangle whether PF only encodes conventionalized expressions of politeness or does fulfill other functions. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed on our data, for which an R script is also provided. We argue that PF is in fact only occasionally used as an expression of politeness. Apart from these uses, we distinguish between cases where PF functions as a marker of illocutionary force and other discourse functions, that include the expression of impatience, disapproval or an intense desire. While the formulaic use of PF is mainly limited to routine situations in the public sphere, the other functions are typical of private conversations.