‘I just want to make love to you’ - Seductive strategies in blues lyrics

In this paper, speech act theory has been applied to the analysis of seductive strategies in blues lyrics. The songs in the study center around the high-cost request for making love, and it will be argued that the requests in the songs are composed of the same elements as high-cost requests in real life. While in most songs, there is a core speech act, which may vary in directness, songwriters add the same kind of supporting strategies that are used in similarly high-cost real-life requests: the core request can contain internal modifiers (i.e. hedges), and it is generally embedded in a variety of external modifying moves, which may include flattery, downplayers, promises, and reasons.