Language is a means of communication; people use language to accomplish such functions as ordering, promising, and arguing and so on. However, any communicative function needs to be carried out within a context, which may be either interpersonal or social. In the process of communication the speakers of a language are expected to be in possession of two sets of capabilities: They should have knowledge of the forms of language they use. Moreover, they must know how to use this knowledge in negotiating meaning. In order to clarify meaning, the speakers and hearers or writers and readers should be able to interact. Language communication has long been an indispensable activity of human beings, through which people expose to others their own knowledge, social distance, cultural features, and personality traits. These aspects are best illustrated in the form of daily conversation, the most popular type of language communication and of spoken discourse.

To have successful conversations, each interlocutor has to perform some conversational principles such as: the cooperative and the politeness principles. Among them, Politeness plays an important role in making utterances in communicative process. Evenly, it also contributes in helping speakers decide whether or not to produce the first pair part of the base sequence in order to avoid failure in communication. 

When using requests, most speakers especially Asian people may often use pre-sequences as hedges for example “Are you free this evening?” or “What are you doing this evening?” to survey if their requests can be carried out. Since the two countries, Great Britain and Vietnam, have different cultures, the British culture is affected by the European culture and Vietnamese culture by the Asian culture.  The difference of culture causes the difference of language. In fact, many failures have been occurred in intra-cultural and cross-cultural linguistic communication. The failures are often vaguely diagnosed as impolite behavior on the part of the other person. The reasons are socially motivated. Requestives are intrinsically face-threatening acts. They either predicate a future action of the addressee and in so doing put some pressure on him to do or to refrain from doing an action, hence infringing on his freedom of action; or they predicate a future action of the speaker and in so doing put some pressure on the addressee to accept or reject it, hence incurring a debt or a responsibility for the action done. There are various strategies to minimize the threat by using pre-sequences as hedges or surveys. 

Pre-sequences can come before different kinds of first pair parts such as requests, invitations, offers, or announcements that are much more used in daily communication and widely applied in speech acts. For speech act of directives, usage of pre-sequences is considered as one of the politeness strategies. Directives potentially threaten the addressee’s face because they may restrict the addressee’s freedom to act according to his/her will. In an attempt to avoid face-threatening acts, speakers use special pre-sequence strategies to minimize the threat. Moreover, these types of pre-sequences are used in an attempt to avoid dispreferred responses. Schegloff (1995) [45] explains this interactive function of pre-sequences:

“The initial turn of a pre-sequence does two things: it projects the contingent possibility that a base first pair part will be produced; and 

makes relevant the production of a second pair part; namely a response to the pre-sequence. And it is on this response that the projected occurrence of the base first pair part is made contingent.”      [45, p. 21]

In other words, a pre-sequence lets the co-participant know that a first pair part proposing a certain type of action, like a request, may be coming. Also, the initial turn of a pre-sequence makes a response relevant. Most importantly, based on the positive, neutral, or negative response to the first pair part of pre-sequences, the speaker can decide whether or not to produce the first pair part of the base sequence, i.e., the request, the invitation,  etc. By this way the speaker can avoid a dispreferred response by producing a first pair part of the base sequence only if he/she has evidence that action proposed by the first pair part will receive a preferred response.