A study of request markers in english family letters from 1623 to 1660

Performative verbs in requests: evidence from eighteenth-century letters

“…Sönmez (2005) analyses request expressions in family letters in the seventeenth century, using the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler and other collections. She selects both unmarked requests and conventional indirect requests formulated most commonly with verbs such as beseech, beg, please, entreat, pray and desire.…”

“…Culpeper and Demmen 2011;Włodarczyk 2013). In this respect, Sönmez (2005) analyses several requestive verbs such as beg, beseech, desire, entreat, please, pray, and request in her study on this speech act in seventeenth-century family letters, and finds revealing results concerning the selection of request markers depending on variables such as age.…”