Sentences of Type 3 pose several problems.  As I said in class, they seem to refute the Conservative approach to indirect force, because their telltale syntactic features mandate their indirect understandings in a way that bypasses Gricean calculation or working-out of any other sort.  They also force us to admit that syntax itself can be affected by force (which should not happen, according to a natural model of the relation between syntax, semantics and pragmatics), and their underlying syntactic and semantic structures are highly problematic; but never mind those comparatively technical issues.

    Suppose we solve the conventionality problem regarding sentences of Type 2.  Conditional upon that supposition, I think we have a line on sentences of Type 3 as well.  It starts with the fact that Type-3 sentences can be generated from corresponding Type-2 sentences by the simple addition of the telltale features in question:   "Can you please be a little quieter?" results from adding "please" to "Can you be a little quieter?," "Here, I need that wrench" from "I need that wrench," etc.  Notice too that the telltale properties are precisely those that are most at home in sentences having the literal moods and locutionary contents that the Type-3 sentences have indirectly: "Please be a little quieter," "Here, hand me that wrench."

    Suppose there is a gradual conventionalizing process of the sort suggested by Searle and by Davis (the suggestion is worked out in some detail in a famous paper by the linguist Jerry Morgan).  The process results in sentences of Type 2, i.e., sentences that are normally heard as having their indirect forces rather than as having the forces indicated by their literal contents and moods.  Once they are heard in that way (their literal understandings still being recoverable but only by the philosopher and/or the smart-aleck), it would become natural to apply to them the surface-syntactic elements that are associated with their indirect forces in sentences that have those forces directly--especially because, unlike Type-1 sentences, they are now conventionally used as having their indirect forces and so the practice is enshrined in English.  (Compare the use in semiliterate dialects of "RSVP" as a fused intransitive verb; as soon as that usage became conventional in those dialects, the spooky bilingual redundancy "Please RSVP" became grammatical in those dialects as well.)

    On this view, the telltale features generate something like conventional implicatures.  Each one indicates noncancellably that the containing utterance has the relevant force, of course without the utterance's asserting the latter content.

    What have I accomplished here?  The Conservative approach is still refuted by the Type-3 examples, since I have had to appeal to special conventions.  But, notice, we've been assuming that the special conventions are needed to explain the phenomena of Type 2; it is Type-2 sentences that had already refuted the Conservative approach.  My account of Type-3 sentences, if correct, shows that such sentences are not after all a special problem, an order of magnitude nastier than the Type-2 examples.

    I said in class that the telltale features cannot be plugged into Type-1 sentences, at least not nearly as comfortably as they can be plugged into Type-2's.  (??"It's cold in here, please"; ??"Here, I wonder what time it is.")  That is just what we should expect according to the foregoing account, since the original Type-1 sentences are not, out of context, heard as carrying indirect force.  (As always, this is a matter of degree, since what were Type-1 sentences can harden into Type-2's and the hardening process is gradual.)  I should report one apparent counterexample which you may have heard yourself:  At Miami Subs on Franklin Street, the counter clerk who takes your order gives you a number, and when your order is ready they call out the number and you go and pick up your food.  The form of words they use in calling you is, "Number n, your order's ready, please."  I hate that, and have asked them to stop it.