The speech act of request and its expressions in German interlanguage of Macedonian learners

The speech act of request as a direct illocutionary speech act has the aim to bring the interlocutor in a situation in which he/she has to make a change of the status or perform some action. When we want to ask something, we think immediately of the use of imperative sentences and the request is seen as a kind of a special order. However, in addition to imperative sentences, this speech act may be expressed by other linguistic means including other speech acts with the sole purpose of performing what the speaker wants to be achieved. The request as a speech act may be expressed as an appeal, as a type of instruction, giving permission or prohibition, by using various linguistic means in order to mitigate or enhance the request. The modalities of expressions of the speech act of request in the German language can be implemented by using a variety of communication forms of expression, such as: explicitly-performative utterances, interrogative sentences with auxiliary or modal verbs, interrogative sentences without auxiliaries, but also with particles bitte/mal, indirect questions in phrasal structures, propositional sentences (affirmative sentences) with or without modal verb, imperative sentences, unspecified verb phrases, participle forms (phrases with participle form of the verb), and others expressions. All of these expressions are presented and discussed in this paper supported by examples obtained from Macedonian learners of the German language. Keywords: speech acts, request, pragmatic competence, expression