Watch Your Language Blog

You might want to consider looking into...

"You might want to consider looking into using this type of evidence in your paper," said my professor. Really?! With so many verbs (exactly four: "might," "want," "to consider," "looking into") between me and what I needed to do ("use a certain type of evidence to make my paper better"), I did not feel particularly compelled to do anything about it at all. In my mind, my professor was making a rather vague suggestion and naturally, my reaction was to take little notice of it.

The extent to which I was wrong about this becomes more apparent if a similar construction is used in a different context. Needless to say, I understood this years and many more linguistic papers later. Had my professor, in an unlikely event, said over lunch, "You may want to consider passing me the salt," the sentence would have sounded really strange, even to my non-English-native self. Also, I would have not have mistaken it for a vague suggestion, but understood it as a rather strong request, full of sarcasm.

There's so much more to language rules than ways of attaching verb endings, and all of it is much more interesting, too. For instance, there are things we can do simply by uttering the right words, that is, the action is in the saying: we make promises, give advice, make suggestions, or, a case in point, make requests and give orders. When we do things with words, we can do so directly or indirectly, but as in other matters of life, the choice between the two is only partially our own. We must follow the rules of appropriate social interaction and language use.

You can say, "Close the window!" to make a direct request, with or without "please," depending on how rushed you are or how polite you need to be. But you can also do it more indirectly by asking "Can you close the window?," only literally a question about your ability to do it. You can even state "I'm cold" or exclaim "It's freezing!," and if you do it in the right context, you will be right to expect that these will be correctly interpreted as your requests to have the window closed.

Finally, you may want to say, well, "You may want to close the window" or even "You may want to look into closing the window," if you're particularly annoyed about someone tolerating the strong draft. So, "Can you close the window?" is just your standard garden-variety polite indirect request; "You may want to close the window" is a polite but firm request; and "You may want to look into closing the window" is very indirect, but inappropriately so for the context, and it can only be interpreted as a sarcastic demand.

Indirectness might be universally considered to be more polite. But the ways in which indirect requests, for example, are customarily made (as questions or as statements using modal verbs, to take two examples) and the social contexts in which they are desirable or even mandatory vary across languages and cultures. To the contrary of my interpretation, the line-up of verbs--"might," "want," "to consider," "looking into"--in my professor's comment on my paper was actually inversely proportionate to my freedom to act: the more of those, the less I was allowed to ignore it.

So, in American English, but not in some other languages I'm familiar with, it seems more acceptable to use the imperative to make a direct request such as "Pass me the salt (please)," but not "Change this paragraph (please)," perhaps because the latter example implies a judgment on someone's personal achievement. The more consequential and forceful the request, the more polite and oblique it is expected to be. "You might want to look into..." is then used as a face-saving technique, as an allusion to the freedom of choice, even when it is obviously just apparent; you're really making a request with little wiggle-room. That is, what happens if someone doesn't want to look into it? Could he or she take this literally without any consequences?

For all the criticism Americans sometimes get for their directness and "getting down to business" without much ado, they tend to be very indirect in the ways they tell other people what to do--even when they have the authority to do so and mean their requests very seriously. So, imperatives and modal verbs like "should," "must," or "need to" are used quite differently than in some other languages. You wouldn't blink before using dovere (must, should) in Italian; this usage, when transported into English, will raise brows very quickly.

It takes a long time to learn how to do things with words, whether in your first or in your second language. In the process, we often abruptly judge each other based on the usage differences we have hard time describing, even less so explaining, on the use, and misuse, of the intricate implicit rules of conversation. We frequently go beyond simple polite and rude (too vague, too blunt; too evasive, too bossy; too up-front, too devious), take offense or make sweeping generalizations about national characters and cultures--and we do not even need to cross any borders to do it.

But the real point of this is, as my friend suggested, that unless you know a second language, you are never really aware of what your implicit biases are. [ZVIEZDANA]

Tags: English, making requests, politeness, sarcasm, speech acts
June 3, 2008