Not all speech acts are as 'direct' as those we have been discussing; there is often a mismatch between 'sentence meaning' (locutionary force; literal meaning; semantic sense) on the one hand and 'utterance meaning' (illocutionary force; indirect meaning; communicative valuc) on the other. As Searle says
in hints, insinuations, irony,
and metaphor...the speaker's
utterance meaning and the sentence
meaning come apart in various
ways. One important class of
such cases is that in which the
speaker utters a sentence, means
what he says, but also something
more... In such cases a sentence
that contains illocutionary force
indicators for one kind of
illocutionary [speech] act can be
uttered to perform, IN ADDITION,
another type of... act
and gives the example of the interrogative/question or declarative/statement heard as a request, e.g. 'can you reach the salt?' or 'I would appreciate it if you would get off my foot' where, as he points out, it takes some ingenuity to imagine a situation in which these utterances would not be requests.
Being able to make valid requests and to recognize valid requests in the utterances of others constitutes a part of an individual's communicative competence and derives from a knowledge of the community ground rules which constrain and facilitate communicative interaction.
Consider indirect requests beginning with the conditions under which an imperative is heard as a request:
If A addresses to B an imperative specifying an action X at time T1 and B believes that A believes that
1 (a) X should be done for a purpose Y (need for the action)
(b) B would not do X in the absence of the request (need for the request)
2 B has the ability to do X
3 B has the obligation to do X or is willing to do it
4 A has the right to tell B to do X
then A is heard as making a valid request for action.
The significant feature of this set of conditions is the series of terms – need, action, request, ability, obligation, millingness, right – none of which refers to linguistic categories or concepts, i.e. they do not form part of models of the code. They belong, rather obviously, to models of society rather than of language. They are non-linguistic and, indeed, anthropological/sociological and therefore constitute (as did the notions we discussed earlier as we distinguished promising, threatening and warning) part of the social context of language use; relative rather than universal features of crucial imporance to the translator.
We can extend the discussion of indirect requests from the imperative = request combination to interrogatives and declaratives which function as requests. Labov and Fanshel give the following rule:
If A makes to B a request for information or an assertion to B about
(a) the existential status of an action X
(b) the time T1 that an action might be performed
(c) any of the preconditions for a valid request for X as given in the Rule for Requests
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