. From the speaker’s point of view, the hearer is able to do this act but it is not obvious that the hearer will do it in the normal course of events or of the hearer’s own accord (Searle 1969). Requests have been the most researched speech act to date in cross-cultural, variational and interlanguage pragmatics (e.g. recently by Barron 2008; Byon 2006; Felix-Brasdefer 2007; Ogiermann 2009; Rue and Zhang 2008; Shively 2011; Upadhyay 2003; Woodfield 2008; Yu 2011) as well as in Conversation Analysis research (e.g. Al-Gahtani and Röver 2012; Taleghani-Nikazm 2005; 2006; Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010)