Used three principal databases

1.1 Request as a Speech Act:

Request is one of many speech acts that are used quite frequently in everyday human interactions. Falling under directives together with order, command, appeal, and entreaty besides being an FTA, a request represents an effort on the part of the speaker to get the hearer to do something, generally for a speaker’s goal and best interest which does not seem that this hearer is expected do it according to his/her default course of action or at the hearer's own accord (Jalilifar, 2009). It is beneficial to the speaker but usually costly to the hearer, since imposition is placed on the hearer to meet the speaker’s needs. Wierzbicka (1990, 2003, 2010) emphasises that the speaker has no authority over the hearer to ask for the required act and the hearer is under no obligation to perform the requested act. Hence, request threatens the negative face since it implies that the hearer's freedom will be constrained in some respects. Therefore, the notion of politeness comes into play where the speaker’s needs to attempt to minimise the cost put on the hearer by reducing the level of imposition to save the hearer’s negative face at one level and to get him/her to comply with the request, achieve the communicative goal at another (Ogiermann, 2009; Locastro, 1997). This can be achieved by a variety of means including the verbal resources (modification devices) with which one can manipulate the level of imposition incurred as a means of maintaining indirectness and in turn achieve politeness.
Making a request is very situation-dependent, Abdul Sattar et al. (2009) apprise that on performing a request effectively, speakers should critically consider aspects such as the hearer, the pertinent relationship, the topic, the purpose, and the appropriate linguistic forms to realise the speech act. Similarly, the degree of imposition associated
with the FTA, the relative power of the hearer, and the social distance between the interlocutors are three social variables that need to be considered on assessing weightiness. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984: 206) explain that requests “call for considerable cultural and linguistic expertise on the part of the learner” and that they “require a high level of appropriateness for their successful completion”. Therefore, it can be clearly stated that it is necessary that language learners should acquire the sociocultural norms of the TL community in order to avoid communication breakdown. Further it has been stressed that efforts should be made by the speakers to ‘‘minimise the imposition involved in the act itself’’, utilising some mitigators and indirect strategies to soften this imposition force, part of the linguistic expertise (cited in Jalilifar, 2009: 65). Blum-Kulka et al. (1989: 18) define mitigators as pragmalinguistic items that soften the impositional force of a request by means of lexical and phrasal modification which can be either internal to the head act of the request or external to it.