Following Searles classification of speech acts, requests are categorized as directives whose aim is to get the speaker to do something ( Searle, 1969, p.11). Moreover, according to Brown and Levinsons politeness model ( 1987 ), DSAs are face-threatening acts, they make the receiver react to the speakers utterance and take a particular action in a given situation.

For the purpose of the investigation, the directive speech acts of 24 films, 12 in English and 12 in Spanish, were extracted and analysed.

A classification taxonomy, inspired by previous research, was created in order to categorize the different types of directive speech acts and determine their level of (in)directness.

This research makes a valuable contribution to the exploration of speech acts in filmspeak and informs the existing local grammar descriptions of the linguistic patterns of directive speech acts.

The two main objectives of the study are 1) to investigate the linguistic and pragmatic representation of DSA in British English and Peninsular Spanish films; 2) to analyse contrastively how DSA are performed in British English and Spanish, focussing on the level of directness of the DSA.

The overall aim of this investigation is to gain an insight into the representation of DSA analysing, for that purpose, interactions in cinematic text.

This research contributes to the on-going development of corpus pragmatics and local grammars ( Barnbrook, 2002 ): an alternative approach to general grammars which helps provide a description of language in use.

More specifically, as Su (2017) points out, the elaboration of local grammars of speech acts helps establish the connection between linguistic forms and their communicative function.

This is an invaluable tool for researchers and scholars as it allows them to ascertain the linguistic features of speech acts in conversational exchanges.

However, film dialogues are the result of a linguistic activity carried out by script writers and they are produced by the characters activity of speaking.

In spite of much debate on this topic, in this paper we agree with Alvarez-Pereyre (2011) that tele-cinematic discourse provides highly suitable linguistic specimens, thanks to its particular combination of spoken grammar and normalized texture.

It has been argued that despite the fact that filmspeak and film discourse can be regarded as artificial, they are a genre in their own right and both are a representation of how communication takes place between human beings.

In his discussion, Alvarez-Pereyre (2011) claims that films can prove useful for linguistic research because they provide acceptable facts of language and a pool of utterances that have been validated by native speakers.

The interference of extralinguistic elements in films can actually be beneficial because they often shed useful metalinguistic light on the facts of language and its use.

Moreover, elements from the cinematic apparatus can provide useful clues on the relationship between the form, meaning and functions of lexicogrammatical structures.

The use of film helps to analyse the structural-functional system of the language and to tackle linguistic-pragmatic strategies in dialogue.

Similarly, films may be used to carry out quantitative analyses, especially regarding linguistic structures.

My hypothesis is that the English language comprises more varied linguistic resources to produce DSAs than Spanish.

This would imply the use of more strategies for performing these speech acts, such as mitigation, thus providing a range of illocutionary forces.

Conversely, the realization of DSAs in Spanish would be carried out using a more limited variety of linguistic resources as well as a less frequent use of mitigation devices.

It also provides an overview of the research carried out in the area of directives, starting from more general to more specific works, and it includes research that explores speech acts using as a corpus for the analyses the translation of film discourse via subtitling.

Section 3 presents the methodological components of the study, followed by the two final sections, which are devoted to the presentation and discussion of results and the main conclusions of the study.

Searles (1969) development of the speech act theory, in particular the notion of the illocutionary acts, led him to create a taxonomy which includes five speech act types: declarations, representatives, expressives, commisives, and directives.

Following Searles classification of speech acts, requests are categorized as directives whose aim is to get the speaker to do something ( Searle, 1969, p.11).

Moreover, according to Brown and Levinsons politeness model ( 1987 ), DSAs are face-threatening acts, they make the receiver react to the speakers utterance and take a particular action in a given situation.

En La Cama 2005 English Subtitles