6. Requestive Strategies -
6.3 Results and discussions of each strategy
6.3.2 Conventional indirect strategies
6.3.2.5 INTERMEDIARY
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S AWAITS X has the lowest frequency among the five forms of INTERMEDIARY:
3.2%. Yet, it is more frequent than PERFORMATIVES (2.3%), RESULT (2.5%) and AFTER (3.0%). S LOOKS FORWARD TO X appears in every 11th email, while RESULT appears in every 38th email. Off-record strategies go on record when they become entrenched. As such, the five forms of INTERMEDIARY, which tend to be categorized as hints in spoken discourse, have adopted a stronger force through
Forms Number %
S AWAITS (WAITS FOR) X 17 3.2
S IS INTERESTED IN X 20 3.8
ATTACHED IS X 23 4.4
S THANKS H FOR X 26 4.9
S LOOKS FORWARD TO X 48 9.1
Table 6.3.2.5.1. Distribution of INTERMEDIARY
routinization, and developed into a conventional indirect strategy in business emails.
Another evidence to support the claim that INTERMEDIARY requests have developed into a conventional indirect strategy is that the majority of them can “occur with a preposed subordinate clause giving the speaker’s reason for making the request” (Stefanowitsch, 2003: 111), which are shown below:
[26] (a) Since we want to enter the market, we are interested in your market review.
[27] (a) Since we want to enter the market, we look forward to your market review.
[29] (a) Since we want to enter the market, we would be grateful if you could send us your market report.
[30] (a) Since we want to enter the market, we await your market review.
According to Stefanowitsch (2003: 117), only conventionalized indirect requests can co-occur with a subordinate clause referring to the periphery of the scenario, while unconventional indirect requests cannot take such a clause. Since four of the five forms of INTERMEDIARY can be preceded by a preposed subordinate clause giving the speaker’s reason for making the request, INTERMEDIARY requests are conventionalized. Nevertheless, the five forms of INTERMEDIARY lack some
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properties of conventional indirect requests.
6.3.2.5.2. Lack of Properties of Conventional Indirect Requests
INTERMEAIRY requests do not have some features of conventional indirect requests. They are not realized by addressing the felicity conditions for requests directly. S LOOKS FORWARD TO X, S IS INTERESTED IN X and S AWAITS X are inferred WANT, encoding the meaning of want. Thus, their intended meaning is WANT, whose target meaning in turn is S ASKS H TO DO A. This means that the three forms are associated with WANT, which evoke the BEFORE component of the request scenario. In the same way, S THANKS H FOR X is associated with AFTER, for “gratitude” obtained from performing the act is another consequence of the felicitous performance of requests. ATTACHED IS X is related to CAN, because E can read the document only when a document is attached to the email. Below are two examples indicating how these forms evoke a non-CORE component in the request scenario, which sequentially evokes CORE.
[31] Source I look forward to your early response.
WANT I want you to give us an early reply.
Target (b) I ask you to give us an early reply.
[32] Source We would be interested in receiving your inquiries.
WANT We want you to send us inquiries.
Target (b) We ask you to send us inquiries.
The source expression I look forward to your early response in [31] activates WANT:
I want you to give us an early reply, which stands for Target I ask you to give us an early reply. This inference may be supported by the addressee’s response – BI answers SI’s email on the same day. In [32], the source expression We would be interested in receiving your inquiries may have evoked WANT: We want you to send us inquiries, which in turn evokes the Target We ask you to send us inquiries. Since the five forms of INTERMEAIRY are linked to WANT, CAN and AFTER, they are less direct than WANT, CAN and AFTER. In other words, they are indirect WANT,
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CAN and AFTER, which is shown graphically in Figure 6.3.2.5.2.
Background Branch Motivation Branch
WANT
CAN CORE
RESULT
AFTER
Realization Branch
Figure 6.3.2.5.2. INTERMEAIRY
Secondly, INTERMEAIRY requests do not meet some of the properties of conventional indirect requests suggested by Stefanowitsch (2003:110-117). The five forms do not co-occur with preverbal request markers such as please and kindly.
Inserting them makes the following sentences unnatural at the least:
[26] (b) *We please are interested in your market review.
[27] (b) *We please look forward to your market review.
[28] (b) *Please attached is your market review for your reference, … [29] (b) *Please thank you for your market review.
[30] (b) *We please wait for your market review.
In the five forms, politeness cannot be expressed by using the past tense. Since there
ATTACHED IS X
S THANKS H FOR X S IS INTERESTED IN X
S AWAITS X
S LOOKS FORWARD TO X
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are no modal verbs in them, the past tense will be used to test whether politeness can be expressed through them. The findings show that the past tense cannot be used in the majority of them to express politeness, for it tends to change their illocutionary forces.
[26] (c) We were interested in your market review.
[27] (c) We looked forward to your market review.
[28] (c) Attached was your market review for your reference, … [29] (c) * Thanked you for your market review.
[30] (c) We awaited your market review.
The above five structures appear in neither Corpus I nor Corpus II. Google searches1 were used to examine these replacements. One hundred search results for each form show that when the present tense is substituted with the past tense, S was interested in x, S awaited H’s x, S looked forward to x and Attached was x are statements2, not requests. Examples are given below:
[33] a. We were quite interested in something John Vinocur had to say.
b. I looked forward to college with great expectation and in the fall of 1941, I entered Smith College.
c. Also attached was a copy of the monthly report, which was referred to the Western Plains Drainage District Committee for discussion at their recent meeting.
S awaited H’s x and S thanked H for (unperformed) x were not found. Thus, the past tense cannot be used to express politeness in the five forms.
6.3.2.5.3. Positioning
It is evident that the five forms of INTERMEDIARY possess the features of both conventional and unconventional indirect requests. The problem is where to locate INTERMEDIARY on the directness hierarchy. I argue that INTERMEAIRY should
1 I typed the key words of each form of INTERMEDAIRY requests in the Search Box of Google Search.
2
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be classified as conventional indirect requests, and their position is between CAN/AFTER and POINT-TO. Three reasons are offered below.
First, INTERMEAIRY requests are conventional indirect requests because of their established form-meaning pairs. For example, S LOOKS FORWARD TO X is highly conventionalized in business correspondence. It appears in every 11th email, while RESULT appears in only every 38th email. Since the more frequently a fact is encountered about a concept, the more strongly that fact will be associated with the concept, and the more rapidly the concept can be activated when the fact is encountered (Anderson, 1995: ch. 5), the clues derived from the structure provide E with only one possible interpretation. It is almost impossible for a reader not to take I look forward to hearing from you soon as a request for a reply. The inferencing processes involved should be much shorter than truly unconventional indirect requests, which do not have established form-meaning pairs, and whose illocutionary force is completely context-dependent.
Second, INTERMEAIRY requests are indirect WANT, CAN and AFTER, therefore less direct than WANT, CAN and AFTER. Third, it is unreasonable to put them into the category of unconventional indirect requests. The portion of INTERMEDIARY is 31.1%. If they were put into the unconventional indirect category, 42.9% of requests in the two corpora would be unconventional indirect strategies. This is unlikely, because the overwhelming majority of the interactants in international business discourse community do not know each other personally. It is highly impossible that they would use hints nearly 43% of the times to talk about their business while their money is at stake, particularly when cross-cultural interpretability of hints is not expected (Brown & Levinson, 1987: 216). It is important to note that the classification of these forms as conventional indirect requests is genre-specific due to their high conventionality in international business email discourse. In casual conversations, S WAITS FOR X and S IS INTERESTED IN X can be unconventional indirect requests.
In INTERMEDIARY, 99.9% of OBJECTS are expressed clearly, and 49.8% of
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ACTIONS are represented directly. [34] is a good example.
[34] Source: Attached is our product list.
Target: I ask you to read our product list.
[34] is a statement with the illocutionary point of request， which has been discussed in Chapter 5. It is very indirect not only in its illocutionary force but also in its propositional content. In [34], the requestee and ACTION are suppressed, and the requester is expressed indirectly with a possessive adjective. Only the OBJECT – our product list – is directly expressed in [34].
6.3.2.5.4. Causes for the Uniqueness of INTERMEDIARY
The special properties of INTERMEDIARY are the product of the uniqueness of the international business email genre. In international business discourse community, similar business situations occur day after day, year after year, provoking comparable responses. As a result, specific forms of requests develop to satisfy the needs and wants of business people. Those that work best stay become entrenched in the international business email genre.
Difference in media is one of the decisive factors accounting for the special properties of INTERMEDIARY. A case in point is ATTACHED IS X, which can only be used in written discourse since documents cannot be attached to sound in oral communication. Another example is S THANKS H FOR X, which is formal and is most used in business correspondence to match the formality of written business discourse.
The greater power differentials in international business emails may be another reason accounting for the use of the humble INTERMEAIRY whose level of directness is the second lowest. Due to the huge economic gains the sellers can obtain from the buyers, the sellers have to be more indirect when they ask the buyers to read their documents, to cooperate with them, to respond to their emails, etc. Owing to the fierce competition in the international market, the sellers have to ask the buyers to
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buy their products repeatedly. The high frequencies of the repetition contribute to the large portion of INTERMEAIRY.
There are five strategies in the conventional indirect area. RESULT is the most coercive strategy of all. WANT requests are not expressed in the prototypical form S WANTS H TO DO A. Rather, they are represented as expressions of the speaker’s wishes. As such, WANT requests are not coercive in the two corpora. Compared to RESULT, WANT/AFTER/CAN/INTERMEDIARY are less coercive, and they are therefore termed the less coercive conventional indirect strategies in this study.