Previous speech act research has focused on confrontational situations, such as complaints, requests, apologies, and refusals. This study describes a less face-threatening and less well studied speech act: the positive request response. Sixty-five instances of this speech act were collected from naturally occurring e-mail discourse.
A possible template for the realization of the core speech act is described. Considering the entire response, the positive request responses in this study were shorter than Beebe and Cummings' (1996) natural and elicited refusals to a similar request. However, an analysis of the length and content of the responses shows that, when speakers agree to comply with a request, typically they do not produce just the minimal response required to communicate this point. Rather, they seem to make use of an even greater variety of supportive moves than Beebe and Cummings' participants. The positive request responses also featured more semantic elaboration than might be expected, given that they were fairly short.
These results suggest that speakers attend to various face concerns, even in less confrontational situations. It seems likely that strategy choice for other less face-threatening speech acts would also turn out to be complex and worth investigating.