8.0 Introduction

All requests can be modified to modulate their impact upon the addressee. Modification is achieved along several dimensions:

• (1) Different request strategies varied according to a level of directness:

  • Direct strategies: mood derivable; obligation statements; want statements

  • Conventionally indirect strategies: suggestory formulae; stating preparatory; query preparatory

  • Nonconventionally indirect strategies: hints.

• (2) Different syntactic forms within or across the strategy:

  • Modals (e.g. ‘can you help me?’ vs. ‘could you help me?’);

  • Conditional (e.g. ‘would you like to play outside?’);

  • Interrogatives (e.g. ‘can you draw a dolphin for me?’) vs.

  • Declaratives (e.g. ‘you can draw a dolphin for me’) or

  • Imperatives (e.g. ‘draw a dolphin for me’).

The two dimensions above were examined and discussed in Chapters 4–7 in terms of development of Yao’s request realisation (including hints) and its variations according to goal and addressee. The force of a request, however, does not depend only on the choice among strategies or syntactic forms. Modifications can be further achieved by:

• (3) Lexical and phrasal choices.

• (4) Reiterations that occur after the request proper, or support moves, elements that precede or follow the request proper.

In this chapter we will focus on factors (3) and (4), which contribute greatly to the force of a request. Reiterations, as in (4), are one of the categories that either has been omitted from the literature or classified as a subcategory of something else. This analysis, however, will demonstrate that it is a much more significant category than previously considered.

The function of modification is to vary the impact of a request. The force of the request can be modulated to different degrees. The literature discusses two opposing directions in which the modulation can occur. For example, Faerch and Kasper (1989) using DCT and Trosborg (1995) using role-play data employ the terms ‘downgraders’ and ‘upgraders’.