Uzbekistan state world languages university translation faculty the english applied translation department

CHAPTER II ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACTS IN NATURAL SPONTANEOUS DISCOURSE
2.1 The notion of a request and its classification
Let me begin discussion by defining the communicative act of requesting. A request is an illocutionary act where the Speaker (S) tells the Hearer (H) that he or she wants H to carry out an act which is for the benefit of S. S can either request for nonverbal goods and services (e.g. a request for an object, an action or some other type of service) or request for verbal goods and services (e.g. a request for information). The requested action usually takes place post-utterance, either in the immediate future (requests-now) or later on in the course of action (requests-then). Thus a request is characterized as pre-event (as opposed to post-event e.g. apology, complaint). When asking a favor of somebody S imposes some action on H. Additionally, he or she does it at the cost of H. Therefore, a request is viewed as an impositive act. As has already been mentioned a request belongs to a group of face-threatening acts, since S while making a request exercises power or direct control over H’s behavior, and so H’s negative face is being threatened. However, S may also be “in danger” of losing face because H can refuse to comply with S’s wish.
There are a number of speech acts like orders, commands, suggestions, advice, etc. that together with requests fall into the group of directives. Linguists who defined the illocutionary forces of these speech acts often failed to see that these speech acts should be subsumed under two different subclasses, depending on whether S expects compliance or allows non-compliance.
In English Conversation, Tsui argues that the speech acts mentioned above fall into two categories, namely directives (orders, commands, and instructs) and requestives (requests, inviting, asking for permission, and offer), and that these two categories differ considerably. A similar division can be noticed in Wierzbicka’s Dictionary of Speech Act Verbs. She places verbs such as order, command, tell,direct, instruct and require within one class called the order group, and verbs like ask,request, beg, implore, plead and appeal in a second class called the ask group.Tsui points out the most important differences between requestives (commonly referred to as a ‘request’) and directives (commonly referred to as an ‘order’). These are as follows: a request gives the addressee the choice of complying or not complying, whilst an order does not; a request does not assume that the addressee will cooperate, whereas an order does. Request allows for the possibility of refusal. A request can be granted or refused by H. According to Green, “it is advisable for the addressee to grant the speaker’s request, but in the case of refusal the speaker will not be enraged.” Next, Searle claims that an order differs from a request in that the former has the special preparatory condition that S has to be in a position of authority over the addressee; a request is generally thought of as polite ways of getting the addressee to do something. “The speaker does not believe the action to be beneficial to the hearer”, contrary to advices, suggestions or offers. Requests are characterized grammatically by “a level or only slightly falling intonation, an ability to occur with please in final position”.¹⁸
As already stated in Chapter 1 of this study, Searle in Speech Acts, elaborated on Austin’s notion of felicity conditions (FCs), and presented a classification of the conditions that must hold for a successful speech act. On the basis of those conditions, the Speech Act of Requesting can be defined in the following way: