{
  "id": "please.politeness",
  "term": "please",
  "sense": "politeness",
  "pos": "verb",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 10,
  "arena": "emergencelexicon",
  "domain": "general",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "to make a request in a way that shows respect",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "help.assistance",
      "interaction.process",
      "make.verb",
      "polite.social",
      "request.social"
    ],
    "interaction": "help.assistance and interaction.process together enable a speaker to form a request that reflects respectful behavior",
    "novel_properties": [
      "polite form",
      "respectful request",
      "constructed interaction"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "A librarian says 'Please return the book by Friday' to a patron at the circulation desk in the Seattle Public Library.",
      "domain": "everyday life"
    },
    {
      "text": "The 1987 Montreal Protocol included 'please' in diplomatic requests for nations to phase out CFCs, acknowledging sovereignty while urging action.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "In Python's PEP 8 style guide, contributors are asked to 'please include docstrings' when submitting code to the official repository.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "help.assistance",
      "note": "",
      "type": "enables"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "please",
    "pleased",
    "pleases",
    "pleasing"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "definition",
      "note": "definition was rewritten to remove circularity and better align with components; missing constitutive concepts added"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-please.politeness"
}