Informal research! --- I agree with your gut reaction. It seems the 'please' acquires emphasis and becomes a command in the 'Could you please..' variant. I don't know the reason for this but would start researching it by running different sentence positions past native informants. How does the sentence-initial variant 'Please could you...' sound to you? Tone of voice aside.

It would be interesting to do a comparative analysis across languages too.

Source author: Biljana Scott biscott@diplomacy.edu