Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting

TLDR

The study shows that modal verbs are common in ordinary conversation, whereas “I wonder if” is frequent in doctor requests, reflecting speakers’ perceptions of the recipient’s ability to grant the request. The article investigates the syntactic forms speakers employ when making requests. The authors found that requests prefaced with modal verbs differ from those using “I wonder if,” a pattern linked to speakers’ orientation toward anticipated contingencies rather than sociolinguistic setting.

Abstract

In this article, we explore the syntactic forms speakers use when making requests. An initial investigation of ordinary telephone calls between family and friends and out-of-hours calls to the doctor showed a difference in the distribution of modal verbs (e.g., Can you …), and requests prefaced by I wonder if. Modals are most common in ordinary conversation, whereas I wonder if … is most frequent in requests made to the doctor. This distributional difference seemed to be supported by calls from private homes to service organizations in which speakers also formatted requests as I wonder if. Further investigation of these and other corpora suggests that this distributional pattern is related not so much with the sociolinguistic speech setting but rather with speakers' orientations to known or anticipated contingencies associated with their request. The request forms speakers select embody, or display, their understandings of the contingencies associated with the recipient's ability to grant the request.