English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
A police officer who pulls over a driver might ask to see his “license and registration, please.” Similarly, a border official might ask for a “passport, please.” However, in these situations, the asked party doesn’t have the option to refuse.
Does the word “please” imply that the addressee has the option not to obey the request?
Please serves to distinguish a request from a command, but just because something is phrased as a request, that doesn't mean you can refuse it. A business owner who says "Ma'am, I'll have to ask you to leave" is being more polite than one who just says "Out!", but neither can be denied.
In your specific examples, I think that politeness is a major factor, but another factor might be that an utterance like "Passport" is very open-ended — passport what? — whereas "Passport, please" is more clearly a request. (It's still vague, in that it doesn't specify exactly what the passport-related request is, but I'm guessing that it's less liable to cause confusion.)
Per M-W, "please" is:
—used as a function word to express politeness or emphasis in a request
It expresses politeness, regardless of whether the request is meant to be optional or not.
I am almost bristling at the question 'should one ever (my italics) use the word "please" in an order or demand?' There again, that may be traditional British sensitivity! In my opinion it should always be used out of courtesy except for a limited number of circumstances, mainly military or para-military orders.
I would certainly expect bosses, public servants, shop assistants - in fact just about anyone issuing a demand to temper it with politeness. Occasionally some have tried to omit it with me and have found out to their cost!
Please simply indicates politeness or friendliness here; it changes nothing about the validity or legality of the underlying request. It is intended to signal that the official is being more polite than absolutely necessary, and it is human nature to be more cooperative with someone who is polite than someone who is not.
If you go to a restaurant, you aren't required to say please and thank you to the waiter but you probably will, for the same reason.
From a certain point of view, you do have the option to refuse. The consequences for that refusal are probably unpleasant, however, which is why the official can afford to use a gentle rhetorical question instead of an imperative, and why you get better service from a waiter who wants to please you as opposed to one who is merely afraid of losing his job.
Personally, and for at least one professional psychologist I know, the "please" does imply optionality.
However, she and I were speaking of addressing commands to children, and as your comment notes, the other factor in the situation, force backed authority, rules out the optionality. Although, as already pointed out by @choster, one could choose to be arrested or denied entry to a country by refusing to produce the relevant documents.
As to "whether the asker used the word appropriately" appropriately is hard to define. As others have already pointed out there is both a politeness associated with please and a possible emphasis of the request. Particularly in the case of emphasis the questioner used the term appropriately, and for many people the absence of politeness would be worse than any technical ambiguity of usage. That said, commands have a specific form, as @TonyBalmforth pointed out regarding military orders.
As a native (American) English speaker I would never argue that the questioner's grammar was incorrect, but the use of please in any command causes me minor annoyance.
Please (not the verb, of course) is classed, according to Bruce Fraser at http://webh01.ua.ac.be/gramis/publications/Vandenbergen_Handbook%20of%20Pragmatics_Pragmatic%20markers_270709.pdf , as being in one of the subclasses of pragmatic markers. This is generally a fine article, but I'd go with the arguments above that please does not automatically change an order into a mere request (rather than with the opposite view stated in this article). I'd put 'please' (along with the non-adverbial and non-adjectival usage of 'kindly') in the 'politeness marker' subclass (though with a different tone, both can be used to convey irritation). Please and kindly are types of what Wikipedia terms 'hedges', devices used to convey politeness or sympathy, to take the potential sharpness out of a statement or command. Not all hedges are pragmatic markers; euphemisms contribute semantic content.
'Would you please just put the injured bird out of its misery' contains four hedging devices: a modal downtoner (which I believe Fraser would claim was a pragmatic marker but not in the concrete - word or phrase - sense; his term here would, I think, be a lexical marker - an indication within the basic sentence structure itself rather than an adjunct), two pragmatic markers, and a euphemism.
Pragmatic markers (words or phrases) are devices used to facilitate (lubricate?) interpersonal communication rather than modify the content of a statement. Some are traditionally known as sentence adverbials, comment clauses; a more recent term for some is sentence connectors.
I think when someone uses the word "please" in a command, that person is only trying to be more polite with his/ her words. "Please" should be use both as a request and a command.
Working in an editorial processing environment, I find the word please to be essential in keeping day-to-day operations moving smoothly. Our work is constructed of requests. Our engineering staff uniformly phrases requests by leading with the word "can." As in, "Can you move this paragraph to the end of the column?" Obviously, I can do that. Do you think that is something you are going to ask me to do? It is amazing to me how substituting the word "can" with the word "please" changes the entire meaning, from an inquiry to a directive. The directive form carries a bit of responsibility with it, which is probably the main reason people avoid it. Also, when the deadline looms and people are growing nervous, the habitual use of the word please works to keeps things on a professional level.
