Understanding requests

13. Politeness and impoliteness

“…This information alone can trigger, for example, the perception that somebody is making a request or order, circumventing any Gricean inferencing. Holtgraves (1994), for instance, found that knowing that a speaker was of high status was enough to prime a directive interpretation, in advance of any remark having been actually made (see also Ervin-Tripp et al 1987 andGibbs 1981, for the general importance of social context in speech act interpretation).…”

Bilateral and Unilateral Requests: The Use of Imperatives andMi X?Interrogatives in Italian

“…Much of the early work on this topic went into unravelling the inferential processes underlying the comprehension of requests (Clark, 1979;Clark & Lucy, 1975;Ervin-Tripp, Strage, Lampert, & Bell, 1987;Gordon & Lakoff, 1975). At the same time, researchers in different fields have tried to account for the numerous ways in which requests are made, in search of systematic principles to explain why a speaker should choose one form instead of another.…”

Acquiring Assistance from Others The Effect of Indirect Requests and Relational Intimacy on Verbal Compliance

“…The aforementioned findings also have implications for a recent model of language interpretation advanced by Ervin-Tripp et al (1987;also Lecouteur, 1988). The model posits that hearers start with an identification of the social situation in which a speech act occurs and if they can identify an action inherent in their situational role, they will enact that expected behavior.…”