 The very idea of indirect speech acts is, however, controversial. It is not universally agreed that an ordinary utterance of  (13)  is indirect, since it has been denied, e.g., by Levinson (1983: 273–6) that a question has really been asked, over and above the request. Similarly, Levinson have questioned the idea of a standard correlation between force and sentence form, by which a request would count as indirect on Sadock’s criterion.