Ministry of higher education, science and innovations of the republic of uzbekistan termiz state university

Be conventionally indirect

The first strategy of negative politeness offers a solution to the speaker’s desire to utter his wants on-record and at the same time leave an “out” to the hearer by being indirect; the speaker hence uses expressions which are contextually unambiguous, however due to conventionalized language allow him to be indirect. One of the most prominent ways to employ this strategy is to use an indirect speech act. For instance in (1) we have a speech act whose illocutionary force is that of a request, even though the syntactical form is that of a question. We may also notice the insertion of sentence-internal please that indicates that the speaker meant the utterance as a request.

1. 
   Can you please pass the salt?
   

Brown and Levinson assert that there is a degree of politeness in the expression of indirect speech acts; in general the more output strategies the speaker uses in his request, the more effort he allocates on trying to save the hearer’s Face—see examples (2)-(7) for illustration:
(2) There wouldn’t I suppose be any chance of your being able to lend me your car for just a few minutes, would there?
(3) Could you possibly by any chance lend me your car for just a few minutes?
(4) Would you have any objections to my borrowing your car for a while?
(5) I’d like to borrow your car, if you wouldn’t mind.
(6) May I borrow your car please?
(7) Lend me your car.
2. Question, hedge
The second output strategy deals with the speaker’s desire not to coerce the hearer. P. Brown and S. Levinson define “hedge” (8) as a “particle, word, or phrase that modifies the degree of membership of a predicate or noun phrase in a set; it says of that membership that it is partial, or true only in certain respect”¹⁰⁷:
(8) A swing is sort of a toy.
G. Lakoff¹⁰⁸ cited in P. Brown and S. Levinson¹⁰⁹ says that a hedged performative (verb) can modify the force of a speech act (9).
(9) I suppose/guess/think that Harry is coming.
The speaker can equally hedge illocutionary force of a speech act such as in (10), or Gricean Maxims, where the speaker might try to avoid taking full responsibility for the communicated message, for instance see (11) for a hedge on Quality maxim. Brown and Levinson further list number of hedges on illocutionary force (12), felicity conditions (13) and volitional acts predicated in speech acts (14).
(10) Do me a favour, will you?
(11) To the best of my recollection...
(12) That’s just how it is, in fact/in a way/I shouldn’t be surprised/don’t you agree etc.
(13) Close the window, if you can/if it closes, if you want etc.
(14) Would you close the window, if I may ask you/if you don’t mind? etc.