Introducing English Linguistics

Could you
ring her back when you’ve got a moment? 
(BNC AOF 257)
Would you
look at page forty-three? 
(ICE-GB S1B-061 068)
To further mitigate the directives in these constructions, please can be
added as well as certain kinds of adverbials, such as possibly or perhaps:
Marilyn, could you please answer that? 
(ICE-GB S1B-009 103)
So could you possibly backdate it to Monday? 
(BNC H50 12)
(3) Speakers can use constructions that are even more indirect in their
intentions than the formulaic questions given above. They can go “off record,”
as Brown and Levinson (1987) note, by giving the hearer “hints” or “be[ing]
vague or ambiguous” (p. 214) and therefore “invit[ing] conversational impli-
catures”: additional meanings in their utterances that are not overtly stated.
For instance, if one roommate asks another for help moving a couch and
receives the reply After I’m done with my coffee, it would be possible a few min-
utes later for the roommate requesting the help to utter Are you done with your
coffee yet? This question serves as a non-threatening way of reminding her
roommate that it is time to move the couch.
The example below could be interpreted as a request to “shut the win-
dow” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 215) or turn on the heat, even though the
utterance is a declarative sentence that could be a simple statement of fact.
It’s cold in here.
The next example avoids directly ordering members of a swim team to
attend practices by using a passive verb with no agent and a somewhat
ambiguous lexical verb, expected:
Attendance is expected from all swimmers 
(Memo, YMCA, Cambridge, MA, January 24, 2007)
Does  expected mean that swimmers have to attend practices? This is left
purposely ambiguous to avoid the potentially face-threatening act of
insisting that swimmers come to practice.
The social context of English
67

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The example below was spoken by several waitpersons at a dinner recep-
tion to individuals mingling in groups eating hors d’œuvres and drinking
wine as an indirect way of getting them to sit down for dinner.
You’re invited to sit down for dinner.
The disparate power relationship between waitpersons and guests obvi-
ously led to the indirectness of the utterance.
Although the two examples below are considerably less indirect than the
ones above, they nevertheless attempt to mitigate the imposition of asking a
server to bring more wine, or a host to provide a guest with a cup of coffee:
We’re going to need another bottle of wine. 
(invented example)
I wouldn’t mind some coffee actually 
(ICE-GB S1A-045 214)
While hearers would undoubtedly correctly interpret the intentions of
the above examples, the more indirect the utterance, the greater the like-
lihood the hearer will not infer its correct meaning. But for many speak-
ers, this is a risk worth taking, since they would rather be misunderstood
than produce a less than tactful utterance.