Past research on the development of directive speech acts consistently suggests that directives have become more "polite" across the centuries in the sense that they are increasingly based on face-saving strategies (see, for example, Kohnen 2000, 2002, 2008, Wierzbicka 2006, Culpeper and Archer 2008, Jucker 2011). In Old English there is hardly any evidence for face-saving manifestations, and the "classic" indirect requests do not emerge until late Middle English or even later. Comparative studies also suggest that, initially, the frequency of these constructions is lower and their distribution across genres more restricted than in contemporary English.
But what happened between the Early Modern period and the more recent past, in particular during the 19th and 20th centuries? Can we assume that polite, face-based forms have spread continually? Or should we expect the peak of this development to be somewhere "in between", possibly with a decrease during the past decades? Such a development might appear plausible against the background of more recent trends that have been noted in language use, for example, colloquialisation (Leech and Smith 2006, 2009), with a new preference for more "direct", informal manifestations.
With the availability of new corpora that cover large parts of the 19th and 20th centuries (CONCE and B-LOB 1901, 1931 together with LOB 1961 / F-LOB 1991) these questions may basically be answered. In my contribution I will trace the development and distribution of the classic indirect requests during the 19th and 20th centuries and look at the emergence and spread of new manifestations (for example, you might like to, I would suggest, I wonder if you). The important overarching question of this investigation is to find out how the so-called Anglo scripts for autonomy (Wierzbicka 2006) evolved and spread during the past centuries and in which direction face-based language use has proceeded during the past decades.
Culpeper, Jonathan and Dawn Archer. 2008. "Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play-texts, 1640-1760". In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 176, 45-84.
Jucker, Andreas H. 2011. "Positive and negative face as descriptive categories in the history of English". Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12.1-2, 178-197.
Kohnen, Thomas. 2000. "Corpora and speech acts: The study of performatives". In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt(eds.). Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory: Proceedings of the 20th ICAME Conference, Freiburg im Breisgau 1999.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 177-186.
Kohnen, Thomas. 2002. "Towards a history of English directives". In: Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie and Hans Martin Lehmann(eds.). Text Types and Corpora. Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 165-175.
Kohnen, Thomas. 2008. Directives in Old English: Beyond politeness? In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.). Speech Acts in the History of English.Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 27-44.
Leech, Geoffrey, and Nick Smith. 2006. "Recent grammatical change in written English 1961–1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English". The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics ed. by A. Renouf and A. Kehoe,Amsterdam andNew York: Rodopi. 185–204.
Leech, Geoffrey, and Nick Smith. 2009. "Change and Constancy in linguistic change: How grammatical usage in written English evolved in the period 1931-1991". Corpus Linguistics: Refinements & Reassessments , ed. by A. Renouf and A. Kehoe,Amsterdam andAtlanta: Rodopi. 173-200.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2006. "Anglo scripts against ‘putting pressure’ on other people and their linguistic manifestations." Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context, ed. by Cliff Goddard,Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 31-63.