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

Politeness and indirectness in requests
As Yule points out, one of the most common kinds of indirect speech acts in English has the form of an interrogative, but is, in fact, understood as a request and not used to ask a question, e.g.:
Could you pass the salt?
Would you open the window?
There is a typical pattern in English which seemingly concerns H’s assumed ability (Can you...? Could you...?) or future likelihood with regard to doing something (Will you...? Would you...?), but normally counts as a request to do that thing.
The occurrence of the imperative in requests is not preferred in many languages, including English and Uzbek, despite its status as the ‘genuine’ expression of the speech act ‘request’. Most usages of requests are indirect whilst “imperatives are rarely used to command or request”. This is connected with the fact that indirect speech acts are usually associated with greater politeness in both English and Uzbek than direct speech acts.
However, there is “no linear relationship between indirectness and politeness”, which means that indirectness does not necessarily imply politeness. On the other hand, “indirect illocutions tend to be more polite
a) because they increase the degree of optionality, and
b) because the more indirect an illocution is, the more diminished and tentative its force tends to be”. Making use of previous request patterns, we arranged them into the following nine categories:

DESCRIPTION OF THE CATEGORY	EXAMPLES
1. Mood Derivable	Clean up the kitchen.
2. Performative	Leave me alone.
3. Hedged Performative	I’m asking you to move your car.
4. Obligation Statement	I would like you to give a lecture a week earlier.
5. Want Statement	You’ll have to move your car.
6. Suggestory Formulae	I want you to move your car.
7. Query Preparatory	How about cleaning up?
8. Strong Hints	Why don’t you come and clean up the messyou made last night?
9. Mild Hints	Could you clean up the mess in the kitchen?

The requests types which are regarded as the most direct are Mood Derivables (imperatives) and Performatives, that is to say, “the ones in which requestive force is either marked syntactically, or indicated explicitly”. Other strategies, like Obligation and Want Statement and Suggestory Formulae, count as requests by social convention.