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The basic steps in the inference of an indirect speech act are as follows [37, 286-340]:

I. The literal meaning and force of the utterance are computed by, and available to, the participants. The key to understanding of the literal meaning is the syntactical form of the utterance.

II. There is some indication that the literal meaning is inadequate (“a trigger” of an indirect speech act).

According to Searle, in indirect speech acts the speaker performs one illocutionary act but intends the hearer to infer another illocution by relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, as well as on general powers of rationality and inference, that is on illocutionary force indicating devices [43, 73]. The illocutionary point of an utterance can be discovered by an inferential process that attends to the speaker's prosody, the context of utterance, the form of the sentence, the tense and mood of verbs, knowledge of the language itself and of conversational conventions, and general encyclopaedic knowledge.
The speaker knows this and speaks accordingly, aware that the hearer - as a competent social being and language user - will recognize the implications [32, 41]. So, indirectness relies on conversational implicature: there is overwhelming evidence that speakers expect hearers to draw inferences from everything that is uttered. It follows that the hearer will begin the inferential process immediately on being presented with the locution. Under the cooperative principle, there is a convention that the speaker has some purpose for choosing this very utterance in this particular context instead of maintaining silence or generating another utterance. The hearer tries to guess this purpose, and in doing so, considers the context, beliefs about normal behaviour in this context, beliefs about the speaker, and the presumed common ground.

The fact that divergence between the form and the contents of an utterance can vary within certain limits helps to discover indirect speech acts: an order can be disguised as a request, a piece of advice or a question, but it is much less probable as a compliment.

III. There are principles that allow us to derive the relevant indirect force from the literal meaning and the context.

Searle suggests that these principles can be stated within his theory of felicity conditions for speech acts [44, 38].

For example, according to Searle’s theory, a command or a request has the following felicity conditions:

1. Asking or stating the preparatory condition:

Can you pass the salt? The hearer's ability to perform an action is being asked.

Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request.

2. Asking or stating the propositional content:

You're standing on my foot. Would you kindly get off my foot?

Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it is a request.

3. Stating the sincerity condition:

I'd like you to do this for me.

Literally it is a statement; non-literally it is a request.

4. Stating or asking the good/overriding reasons for doing an action:

You had better go now. Hadn't you better go now? Why not go now?

Literally it is a statement or a question; non-literally it is a request.

5. Asking if a person wants/wishes to perform an action:

Would you mind helping me with this? Would you mind if I asked you if you could write me a reference?

Literally it is a question; non-literally it is a request
(in the last example an explicit directive verb is embedded).

All these indirect acts have several common features:
1. Imperative force is not part of the literal meaning of these sentences.
2. These sentences are not ambiguous.
3. These sentences are conventionally used to make requests. They often have "please" at end or preceding the verb.

4. These sentences are not idioms, but are idiomatically used as requests.

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