The Modal Verbs: A Speech Act of Request in the Speech of the President of the United States Barak Obama Khalid Wahaab Jabber Misan University College of Basic Education English Department Iraq & Zhang Jinquan Huazhong University of Science and Technology School of Foreign Languages English Department China, Wuhan Abstract Speech is a power in itself. The most significant thing in the speech is the message that the speaker wants to convey. When the hearer understands the function of the message he will responds or behaves positively. Language and politics are fully related, language is a tool by which the politicians can command, request, persuade and declare…etc. This paper is concerned with speech act of request in the speech of Barak Obama president of the USA, Remarks by the President at the U.S./China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, delivered at the Ronald Reagan Building and International trade Center Washington, Dec on July 27, 2009. The specified speech is available at 0TUhttp://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remaks-president-uschina-strategic- and-economic-dialogue.In U0T. In this study the Searle’s speech act theory will be adopted to analyze the speech act which occurred in the speech, modal verbs “Can”, “Will”, and “Must” will be selected to analyze as a tool used by the speaker to realize the speech act of request. This paper achieved the following conclusions: a. speech act of request is the most frequent prevailing in the political nominated speech; b. the speech acts of request are mostly happened in an indirect way. Keywords: Modal verbs, political speech, speech act theory, request, and indirect speech act. 1. Introduction Language is a means of communication, it is a social phenomenon by which we can interchange in different ways, feeling, persuading, advising, warning, teaching and so on. When we intend to speak or write we formulate what we say to be fit the context or situation, this means that what we say is not exactly what we intend to convey, the meaning beyond the words or sentences is sometime different from the form of words . Discourse is a language in action, and this discipline requires an attention to language and to the action (Hanks ,1996 as cited in Blommaert,2005: 2),by other words discourse is a language www.the-criterion.com criterionejournal@gmail.com The Criterion An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Issue 12, February 2013. 1 Editor-In-Chief: Vishwanath Bite © The Criterion