Searle’s Speech Act Theory includes one of the earliest attempts to conceptualise requests and is later categorised by Grainger as part of the ‘first wave’ of politeness research, falling in line with Austin and Grice’s “philosophy of language and meaning” (2011: 169). According to this theory, a request is a type of directive and is defined as a speech act which is uttered by the speaker (S) to invoke any “future act A” from the hearer (H)—also called the first felicity condition or “propositional condition” (Searle 1969: 66).