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As mentioned above, another way to analyze speech act utterances is the degree of directness/ indirectness. Needless to say, requests are face-threatening acts. Therefore, in the process of getting the Hearer to do something the Speaker has to mitigate threat to Hearer’s face, that is, protect the “face” of the Hearer otherwise the Speaker’s intention would be come off. For doing so, when “the speaker utters a sentence, means what he says, but also means something more” (Searle, 1975, p59 cited in Pragmatics & Chinese as Native and target language, Zhang, 1994, p73). It means, “the illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another”. Thus, indirectness should be used in making requests. However, directness/ indirectness in requests varies in different situations. This is one of the arguments in the study.

In order to protect the “ face” of the hearer or to avoid causing any offence from the hearer, the speaker should utter politely. According to Zhang (1994) the CCSARP scale indirectness shows the relationship between indirectness and politeness. In general, the more indirect an utterance is, the more polite it is since “politeness is the chief motivation behind indirect language use” (Searle, 1975, Leech, 1983, Brown & Levinson, 1987).

As a result, the idea of indirectness and politeness is crucial to the speech act of request. To analyze the speech act of request, the strategy types identified by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) normally recognised and used. It is classified into nine strategy types according to the directness level of utterances.

The following table was cited in Culturally Speaking (Helen Spencer- Oatey, 2000)

Strategy types for making requests, on a scale of directness/ indirectness.

Direct strategies

Mood derivable: performative verb used to show illocutionary force, e.g. Leave me alone

Perfomatives: the illocutionary force in utterances explicit named, e.g. I’m asking you to clean up the mess.

Hedged performatives: the illocutionary force in utterances is modified by hedging expressions, e.g. I would like to ask you to give your presentation a week earlier than scheduled.

Obligation statements: utterances which state the obligation of the hearer to carry out threat, e.g. You’ll have to move that car.

Want statements: utterances which state the speaker’s desire that the hearer carries out the act, e.g. I really wish you’d stop bothering me.

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