This essay investigates the relationship between gender and politeness, specifically in the areaof requests. The reason why this topic was chosen is that it is claimed that men and womencommunicate differently and express requests differently. The aim is to identify and clarifythe different manners men and women express politeness with regard to the phrases Canyou…? and Could you…?. A total of 200 occurrences of Can you…? and Could you…? wereselected and analyzed from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

The working hypothesis was that, in accordance with their gender “regulations”,women use Could you much more than men and therefore act more polite. The findings,however, are contradictory and indicate that this was not the case. Men tend to use the morepolite form Could you, and women tend to use the less polite form Can you. Moreover,requests are in some contexts expressed similarly by men and women. Therefore, the generalclaim about women being more polite in their language may not be correct.