Thank you, Sorry and Please in Cypriot Greek: What happens to politeness markers when they are borrowed across languages?

This article investigates the semantic/interactional import of three expressions, ‘thank you’, ‘sorry,’ and ‘please,’ when these are borrowed from English into other languages. Focusing on spoken corpus data from Cypriot Greek, it is proposed that, once borrowed into the recipient language, these terms lose much of their speech-act potential, functioning primarily to signpost locally relevant dimensions of variation, such as discourse-, gender-, class-, or ethnicity-based variation. In this way, they do not supplant native (inherited) terms for expressing the speech acts of thanking, apologizing and requesting, respectively, but rather function complementarily with them to verbalize a more shaded range of these behaviors.