Pragmatic functions of requests in commentaries made by the readership to an online news article

Abstract

The following study takes its data from commentaries made by the audience to acontroversial piece of news,  posted by a virtual newspaper. The theoretical frame is based on Searle’s notions about the non-unidimensionality of speech acts. It is also complemented by Vendervenken ́s proposals about the existence of a gap between the speaker meaning and the sentence meaning. However, given the virtual context where the utterances are produced, a different dimensionality was observed regarding the directive speech acts. During the analysis, we took into account the (in)direct strategies used by the speakers when expressing ideas or opinions. These were classified according to Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper. It was presupposed that the non-existent cost-benefit relationship between the interlocutors in a virtual environment would be a decisive factor for being more or less direct when making requests, giving orders or making pleas. The results showed a high frequency of direct requests with an exhortative function plus an underlying function of rejection. Rejection was also found as a subfunction of the other types of pragmatic functions.