A LEXICAL CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH TO ILLOCUTIONARY CONSTRUCTIONS: THE CASE OF REQUESTS

The present paper focuses on the description of illocutionary constructions at level 3 of the Lexical Constructional Model (Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal, 2007, 2008; Mairal & Ruiz de Mendoza, 2008, 2009). Level 3 illocutionary constructions will be shown as providing structure in terms of the interplay between construal operations and general social conventions. We will present an inventory of realizational procedures that give linguistic form to requests and differ in their potential to instantiate the features that characterize this illocutionary type. It is our aim to show that the realization of requests is based on the use of linguistic mechanisms that exhibit different degrees of instantiation potential for the pragmatic basis of requests. Such basis will be formulated on the basis of Ruiz de Mendoza and Baicchi’s Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model and will be shown to lie at the core of the constructional composition of requests.