Opiniatrety

Asking and Requesting II

In comments to Brian Weatherson's post, Gil Harman put up (without comment) this very nice list of contrasts between "ask" and "request" (my numbering):

[1] I asked a question.
I requested a question.
[2] I asked whether Bob had arrived.
* I requested whether Bob had arrived.
[3] I requested a seat in the rear of the restaurant.
* I asked a seat in the rear of the restaurant.
[4] I asked for a seat in the rear of the restaurant.
* I requested for a seat in the rear of the restaurant.
[5] I asked the waiter for the check.
* I requested the waiter for the check.
[6] I requested the check from the waiter.
* I asked the check from the waiter.
[7] Careful, pal, you are asking for it.
* Careful, pal, you are requesting it.

My take is that this actually helps my case. Let's distinguish some senses of "ask." In (7) we have an idiom. In (1) and (2) we have a different sense of "ask" than in (3) through (6)--asking a question rather than what we might call the imperatival "ask". "Request" is similar to the imperatival "ask"--it doesn't have the sense in which you can ask a question.

And (3)-(6) show that "request" and the imperatival "ask" behave different in systematic ways. The acceptable formulation in (3) is synonymous with the acceptable formulation in (4), ditto (5) and (6). But they seem to be grammatically different. In this case, the grammatical difference isn't an indication of an underlying difference between asking the waiter for the check and requesting the check from the waiter--it's not as though, when you ask, that's something you do to the waiter, and when you request, that's something you do to the check.

Perhaps Harman's examples were meant to respond to this comment from Marc Moffet:

The ask/request pair is pretty weird because “request” seems to otherwise behave like a typical [o]bject-raising verb, doesn’t it? In contrast, “hope” doesn’t. (For example, “I requested something” is fine, but *”I hoped something” is bad.) The thing about Brian’s example is that the differences he notes tend to cluster with other differences that one might reasonably take to mark semantic differences between properties and relations. Your example is atypical precisely because it doesn’t bring the rest of the cluster with it—which makes we think that “x requested me to come to his office” is ok.

I have to confess that I'm not sure about how typical object-raising verbs behave, but Harman's examples seem to show that the difference between "ask" and "request" isn't just a one-off concerning "request me to." So we still have a case of syntactic difference without semantic difference.

Posted by Matt Weiner at March 31, 2005 12:16 PM