How to Make a Request

4.2 How to make a request

Today, we’re going to have a look at a very commonly-used speech act, requesting, and strategies in realizing this speech act.

Simply put, the speech act of request is asking someone to do something, since it’s an act that threatens both the hearer and the speaker’s face, its realization calls for great care. But there are some general tendencies in its realization strategies.

A complete speech act of request may be comprised of an address term, a head act and adjuncts to the head act, as illustrated in the example.

In this example, part A is the address term, which calls the hearer’s attention. Part B is he head act, which realizes the act of requesting. Part C is an adjunct that is external to the head act. It explains the reason for the request.

It’s known to all that human beings value freedom of action and freedom from imposition. That’s to say, human beings prefer to do anything out of their free will. But when you’re making a request, you’re imposing yourself upon others. That’s to say, a request is costly to the hearer’s face. If the hearer complies with your request, his face is threatened; if the hearer doesn’t comply with your request, the speaker’s face is threatened. As a result, the speaker has to be very careful in choosing his realization strategies so as to save both the hearer’s and the speaker’s face.

In order to save people’s face, we have to mobilize all the politeness strategies.Such kind of politeness is achieved through internal and external modification. Let’s first look at internal modification. As the name suggests, internal modification happens inside of a head act. It relies on the use of some grammatical markers. But these markers may not be present in every language. Take English and Chinese for example. In English, the speaker can depend on tense, negation, tag question, embedding and ing-form to modify a request internally. In each pair of the aforementioned examples, the first head act is more polite than the second. But in Chinese, some of the English grammatical features are absent except negation, tag question and embedding.

Besides the use of grammatical markers, the speaker may make use of some lexical phrases, or lexical devices, to soften his tone in realizing a request.

These lexical devices include: politeness marker, for example, please close the window; consultative device, for example, do you think you could close the window; downtoner, could you perhaps close the window.

Besides those phrases which can be used inside of a head act to modify it, the speaker may choose to support his request by using moves before or after the head act to soften his tone. One interesting point is that, such kind of moves which go before or after a head act can be found in all human languages. Let’s look at the following examples.

These moves can be found in all human languages and they include:

l Preparator The speaker may check on the necessary condition for realizing the head act, or get a commitment. For example, are you going downtown this afternoon? And if so, can you give me a free ride to the supermarket?

l Sweetener The speaker may express exaggerated appreciation of the hearer’s ability or some other characteristics, so that imposition is lowered and the hearer may find it easier to comply with the request. For example, I know you’re always so reliable. Could you lend me 500 yuan for one week?

l Grounder The speaker indicates the reason for the request. It can go before or after the head act. It is notable that across languages and situations, grounder is the single most frequent support move. For example, Excuse me, could you lend me 500 yuan? My father hasn’t sent me money for the month.

l Cost minimize The speaker indicates his awareness of the cost involved in the request and minimizes it, so that the hearer will find it easier to comply with the request. For example, Could you lend me 500 yuan. I’ll return it tomorrow.

l Promise of reward The speaker indicates his awareness of the possible imposition involved in the request and promises to give something in return. For example, Could you lend me your math notes? I’ll lend my chemistry notes to you in return.

To sum up, politeness is a principle that has to be observed in authentic communication. As a result, if politeness is absent on one dimension, it has to be realized on another dimension. For example, if you do not modify your head act through internal devices you’ll have to modify it through external devices. But in some situations, the speaker will make a very careful consideration of the situation, and regard a very serious cost to the hearer. In this case, he’ll have to modify his head act both internally and externally. One final word of advice for the intermediate and advanced learners is that, try to modify your head act both internally and externally to play it safe.

Practice