пожалуйста

[alekhi.livejournal.com]

Is there a rule where "пожалуйста" is placed in a phrase to make it more polite?

ex: Дайте, пожалуйста, кофе с молоком.

And why the use of commas? Does anyone know?

--алекхи

Comments

[dzhynsky.livejournal.com]

No rule; just use it when you are asking someone to do something for you to sound more polite.
As of commas, it's a requirement to quote words like конечно, пожалуйста, наверное, etc. with commas.

[luthiele.livejournal.com]

You can place the word "пожалуйста" anywhere you like. "Пожалуйста, дайте кофе с молоком", "Дайте кофе с молоком, пожалуйста", "Дайте, пожалуйста, кофе с молоком". All variants are possible and completely correct.

The pair of commas is used because, in grammatical terms, "пожалуйста" is not a part of sentence, it's a parentetical word. Such words are always separated by a comma (in the beginnig and at the end of a sentence) or by a pair of commas.

[alekhi.livejournal.com]

Hmm... interesting.
Thanks!

[luthiele.livejournal.com]

Пожалуйста!:-)

[philinn.livejournal.com]

Actually, I can hardly remember any rule. Well, you can't place it inside syntagm... And in any other place will be OK )

Пожалуйста is interjection, and in Russian they are allways separated with commas.

[taivaanranta.livejournal.com]

There is no strict rule for placing пожалуйста. If there is no particular accent on this word then it can be placed anywhere, actually it is its presence or absence that matters:) But if you want to really beg for a cup of coffee or demand it insistently, then пожалуйста will be either at the very end or in the beginning and it will be brought out by means of intonation.
As for the commas, Russian has its own system of punctuation, strikingly different from the English one, and in this case пожалуйста is viewed as an insertion and therefore is marked by commas.

[hellga.livejournal.com]

Because in Russian, words or phrases that can be dropped from the sentence without affecting the meaning of the sentence are alwasy separated by commas.

so...

[feriantoz.livejournal.com]

russian language is most liberal language.