This chapter provides guidance on how to send specimens to a virology laboratory, including the need to provide full and accurate patient information, relevant clinical information, how to package and transport specimens and the need to send the correct specimens.

It is clear that, under customary international law, the state that has suffered an armed attack must request aid before other states can provide it with that aid in the exercise of collective self-defence. There are a range of factors that need to be considered that do (or, at least, may) have a bearing on the ‘validity’ of that request. This chapter analyses perhaps the most controversial of them: the question of who can issue a collective self-defence request. In so doing, it examines the view that only states can request aid in collective self-defence and, indeed, further asks whether the issuer of the request must be a UN member. The bulk of the chapter then examines how one identifies the de jure government of the state for the specific purpose of issuing a collective self-defence request. A traditional reference point for the recognition of governments in international law generally has been the effective control of territory. However, this is of minimal – if any – importance to the identification of the entity that can request aid in collective self-defence. Instead, other factors, such as democratic and constitutional legitimacy, are of greater importance.

This chapter examines how collective self-defence request needs to be issued. There are a number of unanswered questions about the necessary manner and form of such requests. First, the chapter analyses whether ‘open-ended’ requests will suffice, or whether they must be targeted at a particular state (or states). It then considers whether collective self-defence requests must take any specific form and, in particular, queries whether they can be inferred. Similarly, it examines whether a collective self-defence request must even be made publicly (or, at least, be publicised), or whether covert requests can suffice. Finally, the chapter engages with two questions concerning the timing of the request. These are whether the request must be made before the collective self-defence action begins, and whether the existence of a collective self-defence treaty arrangement between the relevant states suffices as a ‘request’ (or whether an ad hoc and specific request is still required in addition).

In the 1986 Nicaragua case, the International Court of Justice famously took the view that two additional criteria exist in customary international law for the exercise of collective self-defence, alongside the criteria that it shares with individual self-defence. These purported additional criteria have been commonly repeated in scholarship since. First, it is said that the state that has been attacked must ‘declare’ that it has been so attacked. Second, it must ‘request’ aid in its defence. This chapter sets out the manner in which the Court identified these requirements and whether it considered them to be legally determinative or merely evidentiary. It then goes on to examine state practice/opinio juris, to test whether the requirements indeed can be identified as rules of customary international law. It is argued that the first of those asserted requirements and declaration, in fact, has no legal basis. In contrast, it is argued that the issuance of a request is, as the Court indicated, a binding requirement for the exercise of collective self-defence.

Chen compares Chinese politeness with English politeness in this chapter, focusing on what has been called a “East-West Divide” debate. To advance the position that East and West are fundamentally different, the author argues that Chinese politeness has its own characteristics but not unique; that the speech act of request in Chinese is conducted under similar principles and are subjected to similar constraints as seen English; that persistence in benefit offering occurs in English, too; that speech acts that are assumed to carry high levels of face threat (e.g., criticizing and disagreeing) also offers evidence that there is no East-West Divide in politeness; and that – finally – even the drastic differences in the speech act of lying between English and Chinese can be shown to be motivated by similar considerations. Culture differences are often times differences on the surface: the different symptoms of similar underlying principles. With a set of principles on which cultures may converge and a set of parameters on which cultures are likely to vary, Chen believes that B&L-E meets the challenge of being a universal theory that captures the commonalities between cultures, commonalities that transcend, and therefore account for, differences.

This chapter provides a quantitative analysis the strategy clusters Southeast Asian and Caribbean interactants use for claiming or holding a turn at talk. It can be shown that speaker groups essentially use the same strategy combinations, although some differences also become apparent. The second part of the chapter zooms in on the frequency of selected phonetic and syntactic resources and compares their usage across the two speaker groups. Again, both similarities and differences between the speaker groups become apparent; for example, with respect to the usage of tempo downsteps or direct requests. These findings support the notion of a locally inflected conversational infrastructure, which is influenced by both cultural context and variety-specific preferences.

Ancient Greek does not have a term equivalent to ‘please’ and the bare imperative is used for requests. The understanding of Ancient Greek can benefit from a comparison with some modern languages where the equivalent to ‘please’ is either more restricted in use (Modern Greek) or absent (Danish): these two languages have different strategies (diminutives for Modern Greek, particles for Danish) in the case of routine interactions where the aim is to signal to the interlocutor that the request is expected in the context.

The aim of the chapter is to evaluate the role of the particle δή in such a function of de-dramatization and trivialization of the potentially threatening speech act, through a corpus study in dialogical texts of the classical period (comedies of Aristophanes, philosophical dialogues of Plato). The study shows that this post-positive particle can function as a positive politeness marker (in Brown and Levinson’s sense), to signal a weakly threatening or expected request in the context.

In Chapter 7, we discuss expressions, constituting the ‘lowest’ unit of analysis in our model. We here focus specifically on pragmatically salient conventionalised expressions indicating the interactants’ rights and obligations in a particular context. We propose an analytic procedure by means of which such expressions can be systematically compared by using large corpora. As a case study, we examine Chinese and British English expressions. We focus on expressions popularly associated with the speech acts Request and Apologise. We examine groups of expressions with an increasing degree of complexity.

Chapter 8 discusses how our framework can be operationalised in cross-cultural pragmatic research focusing on the analytic unit of speech act. We first propose a typology of speech acts. This typology is essentially different from others, in that it provides a system of speech acts based on their interactional and relational functions. We argue that in using any typology of speech acts, it is fundamental for the cross-cultural pragmatician to avoid unnecessarily proliferating speech act categories. After outlining our model typology of speech acts, we provide a coding scheme by means of which speech acts can be systematically described in data analysis.