Requests in Akan discourse

Abstract

This article explores the linguistic and sequential structure of Akan requests which are either direct or indirect. It is shown that direct requests are made as commands and may be preceded by an address form relating to the "requestee" and followed by a sentence justifying the request, whereas indirect requests are either conventional (i.e., expressed by hedging devices, acknowledgment of an imposition, and pronoun switching) or nonconventional (i.e., expressed by hints, proverbs, and metaphors). In both direct and indirect request events, the request-offer or request-refusal sequence may be interspersed with insertion sequences. Because of the collective nature of Akan society, requests are generally considered neither impositions nor a face-threat to the recipient, unless the requestee ignores the sociocultural and communicative contexts of the interaction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.