The Grammar of Please

From the reading: The Grammar of Please

Across 189 countries surveyed by the linguistics research platform Typeform Language Index in 2023, speakers consistently rated indirect requests as more polite than direct ones — yet in 34 of those countries, directness was simultaneously rated as more trustworthy. That contradiction sits at the heart of what linguists call pragmatic meaning: the gap between what a sentence says and what it does. English handles this gap largely through embedded questions, a mechanism so routine that most native speakers never notice they are using it. I was wondering whether you could help me is grammatically a statement; socially, it is a request wrapped in deference, its edges softened by indirection.