Abstract
This paper is an inquiry into pragmatic analysis of interaction between husbands and wives in The Canterbury Tales, namely in The Shipman's and The Clerk's Tales. The study is based on Searle's classification of illocutionary speech acts (1975) with a focus on requests.
While requests within the marriage in The Shipman's Tale are all direct and are not preceded by any pre-requests, the communication between the husband and the wife in The Clerk's Tale is much less straightforward. Their requests tend to be indirect, accompanied by frequent hedging, and especially the husband's requests rely on pre-sequences.
It is worth mentioning that also non-verbal communication of the two married couples reflects the same patterns in terms of directness. Furthermore, there is a difference between the tales in the fact that the requests of husband and wife in The Shipman's Tale share similar characteristics (cf. structure, explicitness and frequency), while in The Clerk's Tale no such symmetry can be observed.
The first striking difference lies in the number of requests: there are only two requests pronounced by the wife as opposed to numerous requests on the side of her husband. While her requests avoid a term of address and are formulated very clearly, the husband's requests start with addressing and tend to be implicit.