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Isn't kindness already implied when you say "I request you to..."?

When I say "I humbly request you to...", the word humbly helps me to label the state of my behavior during the request.

On the other hand, what value does the word kindly add to the request?

RegDwigнt
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Thale
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5 Answers5

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Grammar

Grammatically speaking, no, it is not correct, because in the language I grew up speaking — Twentieth Century American English of the Inland North variety of southern Wisconsin — you cannot write:

  • *I request you to do something.
  • *I requested him to be here.

You must write:

  • I request that you do something.
  • I requested that he be here.

Or much more likely:

  • I asked you to do something.
  • I asked him to be here.

Because request is one of those verbs that wants the other kind of construct, the one with that and a clause, not the one with a to-infinitive the way ask is. These are not always interchangeable; it depends on the verb that governs them.

Note that you can request NPs just fine; it is VPs where you must be careful.

  • I requested his presence.

On Idiolectology

In my language, ask and request are different in what they accept as a complement. You cannot “request” someone “to” do anything; you can only ask them to do it.

See how that works?

While this restriction is not something universally applied by people long ago and far away, the ungrammaticality within the lect of standard American English as described above remains. The other form sounds foreign, as from a non-native learner of English who learned it from someone who didn't know English very well, or perhaps from reading dusty old books from authors several centuries dead.

In other words, it just isn't said or written there now. Remember that “ungrammatical” just means that it sounds wrong to the native speaker making that pronouncement, just as “grammatical” means that it sounds ok to them. There are also acceptability gradients between those.

What you won’t be able to do “prove” that something is “correct” or that it “not incorrect”. All you can do is document use and non-use, acceptability and unacceptability.

No one I grew up with, whether friends or family or colleagues, ever puts things together like this. It sounds “funny” to me, something I could not say and cannot say. That’s why it’s ungrammatical to me.

Ngram data

Here’s some supporting documentation for that use and non-use, courtesy of Google Ngrams:

ngram of dying usage

As you see, the request you to style peaked in 1830 and has dwindled to nearly nothing since then. By the time something gets that rare, it’s bound to seem ungrammatical to people hearing or reading it, since they virtually never do so.

The UK version shows the same general trend, but with differing final results:

uk version

The fancy formal "subjunctive" version has not outpaced the older version in UK usage the way it has in American use. This may be because UK use of the "mandative subjunctive" (also known as the uninflected bare infinitive or the "modally marked" form) is quite a bit less common than the US use of that type of construction.

Politesse

As for politeness, we don’t really do much in the way of etiquette questions here. However, things like

  • We kindly request. . . .
  • We politely request. . . .
  • We humbly request. . . .
  • We respectfully request. . . .
  • We earnestly request. . . .

are all frequently seen in formal invitations and such. They are in the “expected” format. As with all language of courtesy, you should not get too worked up over what each word literally means in these frozen, fossilized forms. They have become formulaic, so it is “what people do” on such occasions.

Note that another old formula:

  • We request and require. . . .

is something different; it is in fact a demand, and sometimes a command.

tchrist
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    The last one appears in British passports. – Andrew Leach Dec 31 '12 at 14:59
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    Kindly is out of place here: kindness should be imputed to the addressee, not the addressor. – StoneyB on hiatus Dec 31 '12 at 15:43
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    This is a different and fairly widely-used usage, as tchrist says in his answer. Indeed, in 'would you kindly just give up your seat for my great-grandmother', kindly and just are two of the hedging devices (pragmatic markers subset politeness) (the third device is the would you construction) (and the fourth, the winning smile). Kindly (which some insist is still adverbial here!) is here a near-synonym of please. In the original example, kindly is accepted as being transferred (cf restless night, contemplative cigarette). Though I agree, very transferred. – Edwin Ashworth Dec 31 '12 at 15:59
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    I don't accept the strictures you place on request. In Google Books, I request you to has been consistently more common than I request that you. I'm not aware of any principle apart from your own personal preference that distinguishes between the two. – FumbleFingers Dec 31 '12 at 18:59
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    @FumbleFingers It’s simply that “I request you to. . . .” sounds ungrammatical to me. I cannot generate it, have never heard or seen it within my memory, and would perceive it as a non-native speaker error if I were to encounter it. It is utterly alien to me. What more do you want? That is not “personal preference”. That is native experience, something which you cannot gainsay me. – tchrist Dec 31 '12 at 19:13
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    @tchrist: Well, we're both perfectly competent speakers, so I'm certainly not trying to say that you should alter your own concept of what is or is not "grammatical" (whatever that means). What I mean is *I* do not accept/require the same limitations you place on constructions involving request. And as my link shows, nor do lots of others. You're surely not suggesting there's an "absolute" issue of grammaticality involved here, and that only your perspective is "correct". I do not suggest the converse, I assure you. – FumbleFingers Dec 31 '12 at 19:30
  • Something can be "ungrammatical" or "sounds improper to me" but can never be "sounds ungrammatical to me" except probably in the preface to a text on grammar. – Kris Jan 01 '13 at 07:27
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    I, too, see absolutely no problem with ‘I request you to do something.’ The OED’s first definition of request is ‘To ask (a person), esp. in a polite or formal manner, to do something.’ There are numerous supporting citations. – Barrie England Jan 01 '13 at 20:23
  • tchrist and StoneyB provide the basis for a rephrasing of "I kindly request you to do x" as "I request that you kindly do x". FumbleFingers's defense of "request you to" as an established pattern presumably implies another rephrasing: "I request you to kindly do x". Split-infinitive avoiders would insist on rephrasing this as "I request you kindly to do x", which puts the adverb into a syntactically ambiguous position: The sentence can impute kindness either to the requester or to the requestee, but not to both at once. – H Stephen Straight Jan 02 '13 at 04:38
  • Was any consensus reached on whether *I request you to* is grammatical or not? My sense is that the Accepted Answer is incorrect in this regard. I'm trying to answer a question on the ELL stack using this question as a reference, but this answer seems to defy multiple Oxford guides and dictionaries. See: https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/151094/peoples-say-request-to-is-wrong-but-i-see-a-lot-of-sources-have-that-kind-of-s/151096#151096 – Ringo Dec 22 '17 at 17:04
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    @Ringo Nobody has yet provided any authoritative reference to show that "I request you to" is grammatically *incorrect.* You are right to post a bounty asking for such proof, but conversely, it might not be easy to find references to actually prove that "I request you to" is correct usage, simply because there might not even be much doubt about its correctness. Meanwhile Google ngrams shows that "request you to" was most popular around 1830 and its use has steadily declined thereafter: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=request+you+to&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_ – English Student Dec 22 '17 at 17:57
  • Note 2 @Ringo: Merriam-Webster clearly gives the example "requested her to write a paper" under the transitive verb definition of 'request' at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/request (scroll down past the extensive 'noun' definition to read) so 'I request you to' is very likely to be grammatical. On the other hand, OP is not even asking that, but actually wondering whether *kindly* is used appropriately in the sentence in question, since 'kindly' seems implied in 'request'? – English Student Dec 22 '17 at 18:15
  • @EnglishStudent Thanks much for the ngram pointer; I've incorporated those observations in my answer now. – tchrist Dec 22 '17 at 23:18
  • You are most welcome @tchrist and your own observations are highly appreciated. – English Student Dec 22 '17 at 23:19
  • @FumbleFingers Look at the US-vs-UK ngram: the "request you to" version has virtually disappeared in the US graph over the past 30 years, unlike in the UK. That's probably why it sounds off to me. – tchrist Dec 23 '17 at 02:30
  • @tchrist: I can't see any significant AmE/BrE usage split in this NGram comparing *request you to* in both corpuses. It's gone down a bit further in AmE today, but that might just be a tendency for reprints of older texts to occur more often in the BrE corpus (or for such texts to be more often misclassified). – FumbleFingers Dec 23 '17 at 14:51
  • ...but a search for we request you to may be revealing something significant. I'm guessing we there tends to filter in more results from formal/legal contexts, suggesting the usage was once more common in AmE legal documents than in BrE, before falling out of favour everywhere. – FumbleFingers Dec 23 '17 at 14:59
  • @FumbleFingers I wonder why "ask you to" shows such a clear uptick in the US during the last two decades of the 20th century that the UK data doesn't show. Maybe it’s replaced the request version. – tchrist Dec 23 '17 at 17:08
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    @tchrist: Comparing the ratio between I request you and I ask you gives remarkably similar results for AmE and BrE, so it's not obvious to me that AmE is becoming more committed to the shorter verb than BrE. – FumbleFingers Dec 23 '17 at 17:24
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One of the OED’s definitions of kindly is ‘With natural affection, affectionately, lovingly; with sympathy, benevolence, or good nature.’ There is nothing at all wrong either grammatically or socially in making a request in such a civilised manner.

Barrie England
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I want to comment on the grammaticality of:

•*I request you to do something.

Something hotly debated by tchrist, FumbleFingers, RegDwight and others above.

I agree with tchrist, this is not an acceptable grammatical form.

The reason for this, I think, is because request is not a catenative verb, i.e., it can't be followed with an infinitive (even separated by the pronoun "you") unless it is in the passive form. So while RegDwight above is correct in saying that

"The letter requested him to report to London immediately."

is correct, it would not be correct to say:

"The letter requests you to report to London immediately".

The first iteration (from OED) is only correct because request appears in a passive construction.

As reference, I provide: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_catenative_verbs

I see this incorrect use of request constantly working as a legal editor at a major Japanese law firm (e.g., "We request you to sign the document immediately") - invariably, I change it to "We ask you" (since to ask is catenative) or "We request that you sign the document immediately".

kiwiburner
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  • -1 I think you've misunderstood the restriction in the Wiktionary article. If the object separates "request" and the "to infinitive", the structure is not concatenative: "Concatenative verbs are verbs which can be followed directly by another verb" is what Wiktionary says. If "The letter requested him to report to London immediately", then "The letter requests you to report to London immediately" is also correct because the only difference is tense: neither illustrates concatenation because the two verbs are separated by the object in both sentences. I suggest that you delete this answer. –  Feb 18 '13 at 09:01
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for me the sentwence is wrong. It is not the same to humbly request than to kindly request... what has kindness to do with it?

It is for the "requested" to be kind, not to the "requester".

Hence, the correct version would be: I request you to kindly do something or I request that you kindly do something...

Miguel
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There are two issues here: the grammaticality of the construction 'request someone to do something' and the appropriacy of the adverb 'kindly' in this context. As to the first question, the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) has as one of its examples for the use of 'request':

The letter requested him to report to London immediately.

So that is strong support for the grammaticality of the expression. As to the use of 'kindly', this seems to revolve around who is supposed to be 'kind'. In this phrase it is the speaker ('I kindly...') whereas one would think that the intention is to request the kindness of the hearer as in 'Would you kindly...?' So it seems odd and is possibly a case of transferrence. Personally I would never recommend saying 'I kindly....' at all since kindness is a quality that others should impute to you, not you to yourself. 'I humbly/respectfully/earnestly...' seem more appropriate to me.

RegDwigнt
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Tilly Harrison
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