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Syntactic patterns of requests based on social status and cost of request

Making request is considered as a complex speech act that deals with the
act of threatening someone's negative face. Therefore, in producing request
sentences, people are supposed to know with whom they talk to and what
context of requests they find themselves in. Focusing on making requests, there
are some factors that affect people in creating request sentences such as power,
which refers to status differences of interlocutors and types of requests which,
refer to the cost and benefit of requests. Hence, from those aspects, the writer is
interested in analyzing request particularly, about what kinds of syntactic
patterns that appear mostly when requests are made based on social status and
cost of request. Besides, which factor influences the use of syntactic patterns
more, whether the social status or the cost of request.
Further,the data of this descriptive analysis were taken from twenty
Indonesian-students of the Faculty of Letters in Petra Christian University using
elicitation technique, specifically the written-task mode. Fundamentally, in
categorizing the data, the writer employed the theory of Lakoff (1977) that
consist eight strategies of varying interrogative, declarative, and imperative
mood, with the presence or absence of modals. Additionally, the writer also uses
theory of Sinclair and Coulthard (1985) in classifying head acts, pre-head acts
and post-head acts that occur in requests.
Moreover, concerning this study, the writer found that interrogative-past
tense modal was produced mostly by the subjects followed by interrogative-present
tense modal and imperative form. Besides, the writer found that pre-head
'address terms' such as 'Sir/Ma'am' and 'first name' often came side by side
with the head acts. As far as it is concerned, the writer noticed that 'reason' and
'promise' were also frequently used as post-head acts in requests. Finally, from
discussion, the writer concluded that the social status of interlocutors influenced
the way syntactic patterns of requests were produced by the subjects more than
the cost of request.