As children learn more about language, they use it more effectively to achieve their conversational goals. They choose appropriate speech acts, establish joint attention, contribute new information, take up information from others, and take turns. They learn how to enter an exchange among others from as young as age two. Their intrusions in ongoing exchanges typically contain new information. Planning an utterance takes time, and children learn to plan what to say so as to take turns on time. This can be tracked in their answers to yes/no and wh- questions, where they get faster with age. They plan pretend play, assigning roles, assigning actions, and also utterances for each character enacted. They track common ground and design referring expressions for their addressees, and they repeat new words to mark uptake. They distinguish requests from offers, and, on occasion, persist in making repeated requests themselves. They clarify what they mean when asked and offer spontaneous repairs as well. In all this, they track what the others in the exchange say and choose when to enter the exchange themselves.

Focusing on supermarkets in a Swiss Italian city, this chapter explores the interactional work that couples shopping together do before finally arriving at the counter to make a request. While some requests arise from a need that was stated at the very beginning of the shopping expedition (e.g., ‘I need cheese’) and which then guide the pair to a specific counter at the store, other requests arise from something said or seen in the course of traversing the store. It is shown that even needs or wishes that were expressed at the beginning of the interaction can undergo transformation. Potential purchasable items proffered by one member of the pair may be modified or rejected by the other, and in this process the pair enacts a particular kind of relationship, being a committed couple, in which both parties have a say in food that is to be purchased and prepared for specific meals. The study shows that requests emerge incrementally over the course of interactions, and are situated in particular interactional, material, and economy-oriented environments

Learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) typically do not have enough opportunities to develop their pragmatic competence, as their language learning activities often rely on textbooks (Kim & Hall, 2002) which are inadequate sources of pragmatic input (Ren & Han, 2016; Vellenga, 2004). Therefore, when EFL students become international students in an English-speaking country, they are likely to face communication struggles. This study explores the use of self-access materials including self-paced instructional videos, tasks, and reflection activities about requests in spoken and email communication within the US academic setting. Analysis of twenty-one Indonesian EFL learners’ responses to the tasks, self-evaluation, and questionnaires showed more varied formulation of request strategies, a shift towards using more hearer-oriented strategies, and raised awareness of contextual details (e.g., degree of imposition, power relationship, social distance). Findings suggest that learners can benefit from learning the pragmatics of US academic settings with the aid of self-access language learning materials.

This chapter presents a cross-sectional study exploring the development of young Norwegian EFL learners’ appraisal of requestive behaviour in English and their metapragmatic awareness of the linguistic and contextual features influencing request production and interpretation. The participants were in the third, fifth, and seventh grade of primary school, aged approximately 9, 11, and 13. Through an Emoticon task performed in groups, the learners appraised a selection of requests they themselves had produced, and were subsequently invited to explain their choices. Direct requests were appraised increasingly more positively with age, while the opposite was the case with conventionally indirect ones. Hints proved the most challenging to appraise and discuss due to the discrepancies between their linguistic form and speaker intentions. Metapragmatic discussions revealed a more frequent focus on the linguistic features of requesting in all age groups, with the marker ‘please’ consistently emerging as the origin of positive appraisals. Although contextual features, such as the age of and familiarity with the interlocutor, place and communicative situation, were discussed less commonly on the whole, they appeared more often with older learners, resulting in more nuanced appraisals and suggesting a developing awareness of the interplay between linguistic and contextual features.

This study offers a discourse–pragmatic variationist overview of the use of pliis ’please’ in Finnish requests, making use of two different sets of computer–mediated communication (CMC) data. The aim of the chapter is to elucidate previous findings, which suggest that, unlike the heritage lexical politeness marker kiitos, pliis is preferred in a clause–internal position. This finding raises questions about the nativization process and penetrability of the clause in remote language contact settings. As such, our study addresses a challenge of discourse–pragmatic variation studies: accountability when dealing with linguistic variables that are by definition functionally ambiguous. Thus, we underscore the need for especially discourse–pragmatic studies to make use of multiple datasets, even when addressing what appears to be a straightforward question. Second, the chapter also has the benefit of contributing to the overall knowledge of requests in Finnish, about which there is relatively little quantitative research.

As seen for touch and smell, the closer sensorial access to the materiality of the product is characterized by an orientation of all participants to the normativity of sensorial practices, which might be forbidden – for reasons of hygiene and for preserving the integrity of the product – but also permitted – when that is relevant for the progression into the selling encounter. In the case of tasting, the customer either requests to taste or is offered to taste. Tasting as a sensorial access to the object supposes its ingestion and therefore its destruction: this practical problem is solved by the seller cutting a tiny sample from a bigger piece and giving it to the customer. The chapter explores the distinctive circumstances in which tasting is requested and offered and their consequences for the next actions, explored in Chapter 8. In particular, it focuses on the sequential environments in which offers to taste are produced by the seller, which connect back to some epistemic features emerging at the very beginning of the purchase (explored in Chapters 3 and 4).

An alternative way of initiating the purchase consists for the customer in requesting a specific product. The way requests are formatted, and the way they are produced by looking and possibly pointing at the products, displays whether the customer is a connoisseur or a novice, and project the relevant service expected. The seller provides for a differentiated response to requests displaying more or less knowledge of the requested product. Whereas customers knowing what they request just name the product and are fetched with it, customers not fully knowing what they request are responded to in a more expanded way by the seller. The seller engages in informing – providing a diversity of verbal information about the cheese, within an expert and relatively standardized discourse –  and in showing the product, associating visual characteristics with verbal descriptions. When this is considered by the participants as an insufficient basis for decision-making, the seller offers them to taste the cheese. In this way, the access to the materiality of cheese is provided, depending on the sequential unfolding of the interaction, in a stepwise way ordering vision, talk, and closer sensorial approaches, like touch, smell, and taste.