Direct Level A requester who wishes to make explicit the illocutionary point of his or her request can use an imperative or a performative statement. If the requester chooses to employ a modal verb expressing obligation or necessity, then the request is considered by linguists to be of a weaker, less imposing nature.
Mood Derivable Searle claims:
“(…) ordinary conversational requirements of politeness normally make it awkward to issue flat imperative sentences (e.g. Leave my room) or explicit performatives (e.g. I order you to leave the room), and we therefore seek to find indirect means to our illocutionary ends (e.g. I wonder if you would mind leaving the room).”
Similarly, according to Trosborg, “the imperative is the grammatical form directly signaling that the utterance is an order.” In addition, when modified it is authoritative and must by obeyed. Sifianou also notices that imperatives are constructions considered by some linguists, such as Lakoff or Leech to be reserved for commands and instructions, and therefore inappropriate for making requests. This view, however, has been questioned by some scholars (e.g. Sifianou, Wierzbicka) While Lakoff’s and Leech’s view might apply to the English norms of politeness, it does not constitute a universal principle of polite linguistic realizations.
1. Imperatives (for instance: Leave me alone or Clean up this mess, please) do perform the function of requests. According to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, this form of expressing a request is called Mood Derivable (MD), as the grammatical mood of the verb in the utterance indicates its illocutionary force as a request. Additionally, the use of tags (De Devitiis) and/or the politeness marker please makes the request more polite, for example:
Close the door, please. Close the door, will you Another linguist, Olga Kunst-Gnamuš points out that “...the evaluation of the politeness of a request expressed in the imperative form depends on the evaluation on the cost and benefit scale stemming from the required act (...).”
Briefly speaking, we can use a ‘bald’ imperative if what we utter is beneficial to the addressee (e.g. Have some more tea), contrary to e.g. Wash the dishes, which imposes a hardship on H. She draws the conclusion that “requests to the hearer may be expressed directly in the imperative form without being considered impolite”.
There are some factors that may have a strong influence on our use of requests in the form of imperatives, namely the relationship and the social distance between S and H. Yet the circumstances may force us to use a ‘bald’ imperative, i.e. in situations involving an emergency, for instance, if we discover that there is a bomb in the car, we might yell at the passengers: Get out of here, quick! Direct requests are typically employed when compliance is anticipated, either due to the requester being superior in rank to the requestee, or because the favor asked carries a low degree of imposition.
In a family situation, for instance, ‘bald’ imperatives seem to be frequent (e.g. Pass the salt). As previously stated when the request is to the addressee’s benefit, we are more likely to say, for example, Help yourself to some more cake. According to Sifianou, imperatives also appear in cases of physical distance and power difference, in the former case because efficiency seems to be more important and in the latter because face redress is not necessary.
As far as the Uzbek language is concerned, imperatives perform various functions: they may not only express orders or commands, but also requests. The phonetic form of requests is generally characterized by a soft tone and a prolonged vowel or syllable. To illustrate, let us consider these two sentences: