Abstract
Before asking another person to do something, it is common to check whether they are available by asking preliminary questions, or pre-request. Pre-requesting is considered a politeness strategy used to mitigate face threat or avoid committing a request proper at all. This article focuses on analyzing Russian pre-request sequences and demonstrates how they are organized and expanded in particular communities of practice. The examples have been taken from a corpus of naturally-occurring data with recordings made of two communities of practice, a workplace and an extended family. In the workplace a common respond to a pre-request is teasing, which can also lead to a sequence expansion. In the second community of practice, family, it is common for some members to avoid a request proper through initiating a series of pre-requests and hints.
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