195]. These are examples in which what is meant is not
determined by what is said.
We can make a request or give permission by way of making
a statement, e.g. by uttering “I am getting thirsty.” or “It
doesn't matter to me.” We can make a statement or give an order
by way of asking a question, such as “Will the sun rise
tomorrow?” or “Can you clean up your room?” When an illocutionary
act is performed indirectly, it is performed by way of performing
some other one directly.
It has been found that indirect expressives, directives and
representatives compose the most numerous group of indirect
speech acts [11, 23].
The study of indirect speech acts has mostly dealt with
requests in various guises. Jerrold M. Sadock identified some
exotic species: “whimperatives” - indirect requests in the form
of a question, e.g. “Can't you (please) do something?” and “Do
something, will you?”; “queclaratives” - the speaker directly
questions and indirectly makes an assertion: “Does anyone do A
any more?” meaning "Nobody does A any more"; “requestions” are
quiz questions to which the speaker knows the answer, e.g.
Columbus discovered America in ...? [42, 168].
Summarizing, we can say that indirection is the main way in
which the semantic content of a sentence can fail to determine
the full force and content of the illocutionary act being
performed in using the sentence.
WHY DO SPEAKERS HAVE TO BE INDIRECT?
“Everything that is worded too directly nowadays
runs
the risk of being socially condemned.”
Ye. Klyuev
2.1. The cooperative principle
An insight into indirectness is based on the
Cooperative Principle developed by Paul Grice [4, 14-76]:
language users tacitly agree to cooperate by making their
contributions to the conversation to further it in the desired
direction. Grice endeavoured to establish a set of general
principles explaining how language users convey indirect meanings
(so-called conversational implicatures, i.e. implicit meanings
which have to be inferred from what is being said explicitly, on
the basis of logical deduction). Adherence to this principle
entails that speakers simultaneously observe 4 maxims:
1) Maxim of Quality:
- Do not say what you believe to be false.
- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
2) Maxim of Relevance:
- Be relevant.
3) Maxim of Quantity:
- Make your contribution as informative as required.
- Do not make your contribution more informative than
is required.
4) Maxim of Manner:
- Avoid obscurity of expression.
- Avoid ambiguity.
- Be brief.
- Be orderly.
This general description of the normal expectations we have
in conversations helps to explain a number of regular features in
the way people say things. For instance, the common expressions
"Well, to make a long story short" or "I won't bore you with the
details" indicate an awareness of the maxims of quantity and
manner. Because we assume that other speakers are following these
maxims, we often draw inferences based on this assumption.
At one level, cooperative behaviour between the
interactants means that the conversational maxims are being
followed; but at another and more important level, cooperative
behaviour still operates even if the conversational maxims are
apparently broken. For instance, when the speaker blatantly and
openly says something which appears to be irrelevant and
ambiguous (flouts the maxims of relevance and manner), it can be
assumed that s/he really intends to communicate something which
is relevant and unambiguous, but does so implicitly:
“ - I don't suppose you could manage tomorrow evening?
- How do you like to eat?
- Actually I rather enjoy cooking myself.” [J.
Fowles]
The second remark, instead of being a direct answer (a
statement), is a question formally not connected with the first
remark. The maxims of relevance and manner are flouted. The
inferable implicature is: “Yes, I can.”Analogously, the
implication of the third remark is inferred: “I invite you to
have dinner at my place.”
If we were forced to draw only logical inferences, life
would be a lot more difficult. Conversations would take longer
since we would have to say things which reasonable language-users
currently infer.
Searle adds one more conversational maxim [45, 126]: “Speak
idiomatically unless you have a reason not to.” He exemplifies
this maxim like this: if we say archaically “Knowest thou him who
calleth himself Richard Nixon?” (not idiomatically), the
utterance will not be perceived as a usual question “Do you know
Richard Nixon?”
An important difference between implicatures and what is
said directly is that the speaker can always renounce the
implicatures s/he hinted at. For example, in “Love and
friendship” by A.Lourie the protagonist answers to a lady asking
him to keep her secret: “A gentleman never talks of such things”.
Later the lady finds out that he did let out her secret, and the
protagonist justifies himself saying: “I never said I was a
gentleman.”
Implicatures put a question of insincerity and hypocrisy
people resort to by means of a language (it is not by chance that
George Orwell introduced the word “to double speak” in his novel
“1984”). No doubt, implicatures are always present in human
communication. V.Bogdanov notes that numerous implicatures
raise the speaker’s and the hearer’s status in each other’s eyes:
the speaker sounds intelligent and knowledgeable about the
nuances of communication, and the hearer realizes that the
speaker relies on his shrewdness. “Communication on the
implicature level is a prestigious type of verbal communication.
It is widely used by educated people: to understand
implicatures, the hearer must have a proper intellectual level.”
(Богданов 1990:21).
The ancient rhetorician Demetrius declared the following:
“People who understand what you do not literally say are not just
your audience. They are your witnesses, and well-wishing
witnesses at that. You gave them an occasion to show their wit,
and they think they are shrewd and quick-witted. But if you “chew
over” your every thought, your hearers will decide your opinion
of their intellect is rather low.” (Деметрий 1973:273).
2.2. The theory of politeness
Another line of explanation of indirectness is provided by
a sociolinguistic theory of politeness developed in the late
1970s. Its founder Geoffrey Leech introduced the politeness
principle: people should minimize the expression of impolite
beliefs and maximize the expression of polite beliefs [36, 102].
According to the politeness theory, speakers avoid threats to the
“face” of the hearers by various forms of indirectness, and
thereby “implicate” their meanings rather than assert them
directly. The politeness theory is based on the notion that
participants are rational beings with two kinds of “face wants”
connected with their public self-image [26, 215]:
• positive face - a desire to be appreciated and valued by
others; desire for approval;
• negative face - concern for certain personal rights and
freedoms, such as autonomy to choose actions, claims on
territory, and so on; desire to be unimpeded.
Some speech acts (“face threatening acts”) intrinsically
threaten the faces. Orders and requests, for instance, threaten
the negative face, whereas criticism and disagreement threaten
the positive face. The perpetrator therefore must either avoid
such acts altogether (which may be impossible for a host of
reasons, including concern for her/his own face) or find ways of
performing them with mitigating of their face threatening
effect. For example, an indirectly formulated request (a son to
his father) “Are you using the car tonight?” counts as a face-
respecting strategy because it leaves room for father to refuse
by saying “Sorry, it has already been taken (rather than the face-
threatening “You may not use it”). In that sense, the speaker’s
and the hearer’s faces are being attended to.
Therefore, politeness is a relative notion not only in its
qualitative aspect (what is considered to be polite), but in its
quantitative aspect as well (to what degree various language
constructions realize the politeness principle). Of course there
are absolute markers of politeness, e.g. “please”, but they are
not numerous. Most of language units gain a certain degree of
politeness in a context.
3. HOW DO HEARERS DISCOVER INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS AND
“DECIPHER” THEIR MEANING?
It has been pointed out above that in indirect speech acts
the relationship between the words being uttered and the
illocutionary force is often oblique. For example, the sentence
“This is a pig sty” might be used nonliterally to state that a
certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand
indirectly that it be cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used
literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a
