What makes some indirect speech acts conventional?

Abstract

Indirect requests can be made using a variety of sentence forms, such as I would like …, Can you … ?, Will you … ?, May I … ?, etc. Previous research has shown that these sentence forms are not equally appropriate for all social situations. The purpose of this paper is to show exactly what it is about a particular social context that makes some indirect requests conventional and others not. The hypothesis explored was that speakers formulate their requests to anticipate the potential obstacles (e.g., ability, willingness, possession of the object desired, etc.) which hinder addresses in complying with requests, and that comprehension for these requests depend on how well speakers do this. The results of the first two studies indicated that subjects strongly prefer to state their requests in different situations to best specify the obstacles present for the addressees. Experiment 3 showed that specifying the potential obstacle to compliance in indirect requests influences the speed with which people interpret these utterances. The implications of these findings for theories of language use and interpretation are discussed.