Dear Irene,

I did some work on dative alternation, not so much in English, where one would expect it to be less marked of a construction, but in my native tongue which is Croatian. Taking into account that Croatian is a (Slavic) case-marking language, the number of verbs that allow the dative alternation is quite large (4 plus their aspectual pairs) (I discuss this in my 2007 paper that I've put on Research Gate). So I think the use of dative alternation is bound to be more marked in some way (curiously, with all verbs but one, 'to offer') than the canonical construction. When I look at the corpora of written language, the canonical construction is still prevalent. Unfortunately, there is no available corpus of spoken Croatian, but from what I've seen in everyday speech, dative alternation constructions tend to frequently appear in the media - in the news, TV shows and especially in various commercials, advertisements and flyers - but not in everyday spontaneous speech and informal conversations. This would imply that people do perceive the dative alternation as being more formal and refined (polite?), even posh. A student of mine did a small-scale research for her BA in 2013 and some of the results might support your intuition about social factors influencing the use of DA: with the examples "The host served coffee and cake to the guests/The host served the guests coffee and cake" 7 out of 15 speakers preferred the alternated construction saying that it was "more appropriate for the context it described, it sounded nicer". So yes, you might be on to something.

Hi. I am working on Politeness but nothing to do with dative alternation; more about (indirect) speech act, different usage and forms to express politeness in England and Italy. I am also developing the analysis from an historical point of view to acknowledge development in the conceptualisation of politeness. I am not sure if this can be related any how with your research..?

Irena Zovko Dinkovic - thank you for your input, this is very encouraging. Is it ok if I might contact you later with more specific questions, perhaps? I am only about 7 weeks into my research so all possibly relevant data is very helpful. Valentina Bartali , thank you, too. I'm not sure if it counts as an indirect speech act [although, to my instinctive feelings, the prepositional is slightly less direct than the double object construction. Indirect speech may well become an area I look into so I hope it will be ok to contact you, too, if needs be?

Of course:)

No problem. Should you have any more questions, just ask.

Welcome! I personally do not work on politeness, but some of my colleagues from the Institute of French Studies do so: dr Monika Kostro, for example. Yours, Wanda Fijałkowska, Warsaw University

Wanda Fijalkowska Thank you for the information. As I am studying the concept in English I am not sure your colleague's work would be relevant but you never know in what direction research may take you

hi colleague

there is an MA in Ain Shams University in Egypt on

POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN JOHN OSBORNE PLAYS

Her name is Dr Mona Fathy Rizk, and i think it was done in the faculty of education

it is available in Ain Shams Univ database in Abbasiyya Cairo Egypt

Thank you for letting me know.