Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine situational determinants of one type of expressions used in situations of requests: expressions in which a speaker refers to his surroundings or his own condition without using conventional forms of requests (expressions of a speaker's state: ESSs). In four experiments subjects read scenarios in each of which the protagonist needed to make a request, and then the subjects made a note of how they would say in that situation. The findings were as follows: (Experiment 1) Subjects used ESSs more when it was obligatory for the addressee to obey the request than when it was not. (Experiment 2) Intimacy between the protagonist and the addressee did not uniformly influence subjects' use of ESSs, (Experiment 3) When the addressee made a previous statement which indicated his knowledge of the protagonist's goal, ESSs decreased, (Experiment 4) Subjects used indecisive ending expressions (-kedo, -ga) in ESSs more when the addressee's behavior brought benefits to the protagonist than when it did not.
