Prithee the addressee, as in "if it please you," "prithee" accompanies a request which addresses itself to the threat of being answered in the negative, as though the request were against the addressee's wishes. Stated otherwise, the word "please" suggests that the person being addressed is willing to comply with the request, whereas the word "prithee" suggests that he or she is not willing. This switch from stating the speaker's contrary desire to stating the speaker's wish not to impose signaled a cultural shift in the English-speaking world in which politeness became stated negatively rather than positively. Wider repercussions are observable
Prithee been the final step in the grammaticalisation of the verb "pray". The eventual use of "prithee" outside the "thee"/"thou" usage signalled its transition into a discourse particle. There has been extensive scholarship investigating the difference in usage of "prithee" as opposed to "pray you", both in terms of politeness and grammaticalisation. Because "prithee" eventually came to be used in the same context with the word "you", it is considered to have developed into a monomorpheme. "Prithee" was almost always used as a parenthesis in order to introduce indirect questions and requests. "Prithee" and "pray you" often coincide in Early Modern