2.1.1Indirectness and non-literalness

According to Searle’s (1969)Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. speech act theory (SAT), the assignment of a speech act (or illocutionary act) to a particular utterance depends on the mood of the sentence uttered.11.Following the speech act theoretic tradition, I will use the phrase illocutionary act or, for short, speech act, to refer to the action performed by a speaker who utters a sentence with an illocutionary force and a propositional content. It is the morpho-syntactic features of the sentence (the illocutionary force indicators) that determine illocutionary force (Searle 1979Searle, John R. 1979 Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 30; Vanderveken 1990Vanderveken, Daniel 1990 Vol. 1, Meaning and Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.: 15–16). This theory is often called “literalist” because it postulates a one-to-one correspondence relationship between sentences containing such illocutionary force indicators and their illocutionary meaning when they are used in the performance of literal SAs. In other words, for SAT, sentence-types encode illocutionary forces — a view called the Literal Force Hypothesis. (For more details, see Ruytenbeek 2021Ruytenbeek, Nicolas 2021 Indirect Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , Chapter 1 and Meibauer 2019Meibauer, Jörg 2019 “What is an indirect speech act?” Pragmatics and Cognition 26 (1): 61–84. )

In SAT, in addition to the SA that can be predicted on the basis of the sentence-type, an utterance can result in the performance of another SA. For example, the interrogative sentence in (1) would constitute, at the literal level, the performance of a request for information about the addressee’s (A) ability to close the door.

In many situations, this interrogative construction is uttered by the speaker (S) to indirectly request that A close the door, without S actually intending A to provide them with an answer to the question asked. In that case, the only thing that would matter to S is whether A will comply with their request for action. According to SAT, the request achieved by means of the utterance in (1) is regarded as indirect in the sense that it is performed by means of, and in addition to, the literal SA associated with the interrogative sentence type instantiated by (1), namely a polar question about A’s ability to close the door. To infer that S did not want them to take the utterance of (1) as a literal question about their abilities, A has to use Gricean principles of conversational cooperation, as well as contextual information (Grice 1975Grice, Herbert P. 1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. ). This inferential reasoning allows A to come to the conclusion that the literal question about their abilities is irrelevant in the current conversational context. A will then use the literal meaning of S’s utterance as a starting point to uncover S’s illocutionary intention beyond that literal meaning (Searle 1975Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. , 1979Searle, John R. 1979 Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 113–114).

The original speech act theoretic definition of indirectness thus is closely related to the notion of non-literalness. It cannot, however, satisfactorily be equated with it (Grainger and Mills 2016Grainger, Karen, and Sara Mills 2016 Directness and Indirectness Across Cultures. Springer. : 35–37). In SAT, indirectness constitutes a subset of the category of non-literalness. Non-literal language use — for example, irony and metaphor — and indirectness are similar in the sense that the content of the SA that S primarily intends to perform is not identical with the content of the SA encoded by the sentence-type of the utterance (sentence mood). ISAs, however, are characterized by the double performance of a direct SA and an indirect SA, the latter being performed not instead of, but in addition to the former (Searle 1979Searle, John R. 1979 Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 114–115; 143–144). By contrast, in the case of a (non-literal) ironic or metaphorical utterance, S means something different from what they literally express. It is therefore possible for an utterance to convey both a non-literal SA and another, distinct, ISA. Accordingly, the interrogative utterance in (2) could be intended as a request in a context where A is making a lot of noise.

With (2), S would be requesting that A keep it down. According to SAT, such an ironic request would count two times as non-literal: S is not asking whether it is possible for A to make more noise, and neither are they actually requesting that A make more noise.

In SAT, there is a one-to-one relationship between each of the three sentence-types and the major English SA types (Searle 1979Searle, John R. 1979 Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Searle and Vanderveken 1985Searle, John R., and Daniel Vanderveken 1985 Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.; Vanderveken 1990Vanderveken, Daniel 1990 Vol. 1, Meaning and Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). According to the literalist view assumed by SAT, illocutionary forces are encoded at the level of sentence-types. Declaratives encode the illocutionary force of asserting, imperatives the force of requesting action, and interrogatives the force of requesting information. A straightforward consequence of this view regarding the scope of indirectness is that, as soon as the actual illocutionary force of an utterance departs from its direct illocutionary force, the SA counts as indirect. So, any request for action performed by means of a sentence that is not imperative, any request for information performed by means of a sentence that is not of the interrogative type, and any assertive SA that is not performed by means of a declarative sentence fall within the category of indirectness. For instance, the good wishes performed with the imperative utterance in (3) would be considered indirect, i.e., performed by means of, and in addition to, the literal directive SA encoded by the imperative sentence-type. (For a more detailed discussion of the indirect uses of imperatives, see, e.g., Ruytenbeek 2021Ruytenbeek, Nicolas 2021 Indirect Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. )

As we will see in Section 2.2, in the aftermath of SAT, several scholars have extended the notion of indirectness to cases that do not fit the literalist dimension of the initial theory.

2.1.2Indirectness and the locutionary/illocutionary distinction

The speech act theoretic notion of indirectness introduced by Searle (1975)Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. can be traced back to Austin’s (1962)Austin, John L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts. To simplify somewhat, according to Austin (1962Austin, John L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.: 94–98), performing a locutionary act boils down to producing a meaningful utterance; the performance of an illocutionary act necessarily entails the performance of a locutionary act. An example is (4), which, at the illocutionary level, would be a request to shut the door.

The locutionary act performed with (4) can be referred to by using reported speech, as in S said that A could close the door (Austin 1962Austin, John L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.: 95). In the case of the imperative in (5), the locutionary act would be that S told A to shut the door:

Thus, according to Austin, the three major English sentence-types, i.e., declarative, interrogative, and imperative encode different types of locutionary acts (see also Recanati 2013Recanati, François 2013 “Content, mood, and force.” Philosophy Compass 8: 622–32. ). While different SAs are possible at the illocutionary level, such as the assertion that A could shut the door for (4), only one locutionary act of saying is associated with the utterance.

As in Austin’s (1962)Austin, John L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. approach, the definition of indirectness proposed by Recanati (1987)Recanati, François 1987 Meaning and Force: The Pragmatics of Performative Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. builds on the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts associated with the utterance of a sentence. For Recanati, it is crucial to discern the illocutionary act indicated by an utterance, or its potential illocutionary force, and the illocutionary act that is actually performed by means of the utterance. According to Recanati, the locutionary act corresponds to the illocutionary act indicated by an utterance. In this view, it is possible for the illocutionary act indicated by a sentence (locutionary act) and the illocutionary act that the utterance is meant to perform (actual illocutionary act) to differ. This is what happens with ISAs. In (4), for example, at the locutionary level, S is saying that A is able to shut the door. The illocutionary act that is indicated by the utterance of the sentence (4) is thus an assertive. However, on some occasions, in uttering (4), S performs an illocutionary act that does not match the one indicated by the sentence uttered, i.e., a request that A shut the door.

Another way to approach indirectness in reference to the locutionary/illocutionary opposition has been proposed by Kissine (2013Kissine, Mikhail 2013 From Utterances to Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 118–122). This time, the distinction concerns the propositional content of the locutionary act and of the illocutionary act, respectively. As Kissine (2008Kissine, Mikhail 2008 “Locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary.” Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (6): 1189–1202. , 2013Kissine, Mikhail 2013 From Utterances to Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ) suggests, in the case of an ISA such as (4), the propositional content of the locutionary act of saying that (i.e., that A is able to shut the door) is different from the propositional content of the illocutionary act of requesting, i.e., that A shut the door.

For Kissine (2013Kissine, Mikhail 2013 From Utterances to Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 98–100, 118–122), the illocutionary act performed by uttering a sentence should be considered indirect only if its propositional content is not identical to that of the locutionary act that is performed with the utterance.

2.1.3Indirectness and secondariness

Thus far, we have discussed definitions of indirectness from a formal point of view, i.e., by differentiating levels of meaning associated either with the type of sentence used or with the type of SA performed or indicated. Now I would like to consider ISAs from a more cognitive point of view, by giving a central role to distinctions involving the perspective of the interpreter. One such distinction concerns the primary vs. secondary status of the SAs that can be performed by the uttering of a sentence. For instance, according to Recanati (2004Recanati, François 2004 Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.: 74–75), an illocutionary meaning (or SA) would be secondary in the sense that its interpretation requires the derivation of another, more basic, primary meaning that is implied by the utterance act. Understanding the secondary meaning of an utterance thus involves an inferential path taking the primary meaning as a starting point. Secondary illocutionary meanings meet Recanati’s (2004Recanati, François 2004 Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.: 42–44) availability condition, according to which language users are aware of the distinction between primary and secondary meanings, and of the inference from the primary meaning to the secondary meaning. Whether an IR performed by means of, for example, (1)–(4) would meet the availability condition is unclear.

This question boils down, in part, to asking whether the interpreters would also infer the meaning of a question (1) or statement (4) about their ability to shut the door. If the availability condition is not met, the SA will qualify as primary. (The experimental evidence discussed in Section 4 suggests that this is indeed often not the case and hence, that many of such SAs qualify as primary.) By contrast, it seems safer to hypothesize that, in the case of the remark about the negative state of affairs in (6), the primary meaning of a statement would be available to the interpreter.

The idea is that A would be able to reflect afterwards on the reason why S made a comment about the temperature in the room. The IR in (6) would thus be considered secondary in the sense that it meets the availability condition.

In Ruytenbeek (2021Ruytenbeek, Nicolas 2021 Indirect Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : Chapter 1), I pointed out an ambiguity in Recanati’s primary/secondary distinction. Based on Recanati’s writings, it is possible to interpret the distinction in terms of a logical relationship. According to another interpretation, the distinction concerns the temporal relationship between the two levels of meaning: an illocutionary meaning would be secondary because it is derived after the primary illocutionary meaning. This is precisely the definition that Kissine (2013)Kissine, Mikhail 2013 From Utterances to Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. adopted. According to him, a SA counts as secondary if its understanding necessitates the prior interpretation of another, primary SA. Under this chronological definition, the IR performed with the remark in (6) would be considered secondary because A first has to interpret the remark as a statement about the temperature before being able to understand it as a request.

To return to the question of the definition of indirectness, we can conclude that the direct or indirect nature of an illocutionary act can be distinguished from the fact that it is primary or secondary. An indirect SA can thus be secondary, that is, interpreted without the utterance being understood as a direct (and primary) SA (Recanati, 1987Recanati, François 1987 Meaning and Force: The Pragmatics of Performative Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.: 165–167; see also Kissine 2013Kissine, Mikhail 2013 From Utterances to Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 111–122). Accordingly, recent experimental work on the processing of indirect requests (IRs) such as Ruytenbeek et al.’s (2017)Ruytenbeek, Nicolas, Ekaterina Ostashchenko, and Mikhail Kissine 2017 “Indirect request processing, sentence-types and illocutionary forces.” Journal of Pragmatics 119: 46–62. study indicates that the SA of requesting can be performed in an indirect manner without being interpreted as a secondary illocutionary meaning. (More on this in Section 4.1.)

2.1.4Conventional indirectness

The notion of indirectness that was originally proposed by Searle (1975)Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. is associated with the distinction between conventional and non-conventional ISAs. As pointed out by Searle (1969Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 1975Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. ), a general observation about ISAs is that the content of many sentences used in their performance is conceptually related to their felicity conditions. For instance, in the case of directives, the following IR constructions refer to different types of felicity conditions (cf. Searle 1975Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. : 64–67, 71–72).

For instance, (1) concerns the preparatory condition for the performance of a directive SA, i.e., A’s ability to carry out the action expressed in the propositional content of the utterance. (7) refers to the propositional content condition according to which A will perform a future action. As a statement to the effect that S wants A to do the action of shutting the door, (8) concerns the sincerity condition for the performance of requests. Searle (1975Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. : 66) noted that many sentences used in the performance of ISAs have a “generality of form.” What he was hinting at is that the syntactic structure of the constructions instantiated in, for example, (1), (7), and (8) includes a modal verb (i.e., can and will/would), the second-person pronoun you to single out the addressee and a verbal phrase (VP) corresponding to the action to be performed by A. In the literature, ISAs performed by uttering such sentences with a generality of form are called conventional (and also, albeit less frequently, conventionalized) ISAs (e.g., Searle 1975Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. ; Morgan 1978Morgan, Jerry L. 1978 “Two types of convention in indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol 9, Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 261–280. New York: Academic Press. ). What these constructions have in common is that they all instantiate a more abstract construction, i.e., modal verb + you + VP.

Clark (1979Clark, Herbert H. 1979 “Responding to indirect speech acts.” Cognitive Psychology 11: 430–477. : 432–433) is more precise than Searle when it comes to explaining what it means for an ISA construction to be “conventionally” indirect. He explains that conventional ISAs involve different conventions of means, i.e., conventions about the strategies that can be used to perform ISAs. According to him, a convention of means “specifies a semantic device by which an indirect speech act can be performed” (Clark 1979Clark, Herbert H. 1979 “Responding to indirect speech acts.” Cognitive Psychology 11: 430–477. : 433). An example of a convention of means is making a reference to the preparatory conditions that have to be met for the performance of the intended SA to be felicitous. From that perspective, the utterance in (9) would qualify as a conventional ISA — a conventional IR, to be more accurate — as it refers to a convention of means aligned with the preparatory condition for directives (cf. Searle 1975Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. : 61–62).22. Panther and Thornburg (1998)Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda Thornburg 1998 “A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 30 (6): 755–769. reinterpreted Searle’s notion of conventionality of means through the lens of metonymic illocutionary scenarios, which outline how the propositional content of constructions used as IRs relate to the conceptual content of the SA of requesting. Within their cognitive linguistic framework, the components of the request scenario are a reinterpretation of SAT’s felicity conditions.

By contrast, unlike (9) and the constructions in (7)–(8), the polar interrogative sentence in (10) does not involve the convention of means about the preparatory conditions for directives (nor any other convention of means related to the felicity conditions for directives, more generally).

That being said, Clark claims that even though it is a non-conventional IR, (10), which expresses a question about the price of a fifth of Jim Beam, can still be used to request that A tell S how much a fifth of Jim Beam costs. IRs performed by means of sentences that do not express the expected action are also often referred to as “non-conventional” ISAs. An example is (6), which expresses a reason for A to perform some action.

Searle (1975Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. : 66) pointed out that, even though it has not the generality of form discussed above, under proper circumstances (6) can serve as a request (for example, to shut the window or turn on the heating).

It seems to me that, despite the fact that sentences such as (6) do not explicitly mention the specific action that is requested from A, such utterances would nonetheless qualify as conventional ISAs: while unrelated to the felicity conditions of the SA, a relevant convention of means involves A’s reasons for complying with the directive (or S’s reasons for performing the directive). I fail to see why the notion of conventionality of means should be limited to the categories of sentences that both have a generality of form and refer to felicity conditions of a particular SA type. In Ruytenbeek (2021)Ruytenbeek, Nicolas 2021 Indirect Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , I proposed to extend the scope of this notion not only to remarks such as (6) (the convention is the expression of a negative state of affairs), but also to imperative directives. In the latter case, the convention of means is expressing the content of the requested action using a force-dynamic pattern. I therefore believe that the right question to ask is not whether a construction used to perform an ISA is conventional or non-conventional; rather, it is about which convention of means is instantiated by a particular ISA utterance. Conventionality of means can thus be conceived of as a categorical criterion according to which a SA of a particular type can be performed by choosing from a list of strategies. In fact, this view does justice to Searle’s observation that not all the sentences of the group “Sentences concerning reasons for doing [the action]” have a generality of form. As will also become clear from the discussion offered in Section 2.2.1, whether an ISA construction is related to a convention of means for the performance of ISAs and whether it has a generality of form are two different questions that should not be confused. Because the bulk of research devoted to the relationship between SA performance and conventionality of means to date has focused exclusively on directives, another issue that remains open for further investigation is the extent to which the notion of conventionality of means can be applied to non-directive SAs.

2.2.1Standardization

In addition to the binary notion of indirectness and the categorical notion of conventionality (of means), what Clark (1979Clark, Herbert H. 1979 “Responding to indirect speech acts.” Cognitive Psychology 11: 430–477. : 433) calls conventionality of form is also useful for distinguishing between the variety of indirect realizations of SAs:

There are […] conventions of form — conventions about the wording of indirect speech acts. Can you pass the salt? and Could you pass the salt?, for example, are highly conventional, or idiomatic, forms in English for requesting the salt. Is it possible for you to pass the salt? and Are you able to pass the salt? are less idiomatic, and Is it the case that you at present have the ability to pass the salt? is not at all idiomatic.

Within a single convention of means, constructions differ in terms of the degree to which they make their indirect illocutionary meaning available for interpretation. Consider the following two constructions, both of which concern A’s ability to shut the door.

While their literal meaning is identical (if one interprets modal can in the ability sense) and both can, in theory, felicitously be used as a request to shut the door, (1) is more strongly associated to the performance of an IR compared to (11). In other words, relative to (11), (1) has a stronger degree of standardization as an IR expression. Accordingly, ISAs performed by means of constructions such as (1) are referred to as standardized ISAs, while ISAs performed with constructions such as (11) are labeled non-standardized ISAs, referring to different positions on a cline of standardization. The notion of standardization relates to Morgan’s (1978)Morgan, Jerry L. 1978 “Two types of convention in indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol 9, Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 261–280. New York: Academic Press. conventions of usage, according to which natural inferential schemes have “conventionalized” over time, giving rise to short-circuited inferences.

A similar view was advocated by Bach and Harnish (1979Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: MIT Press.: 198), who proposed, following Morgan (1978)Morgan, Jerry L. 1978 “Two types of convention in indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol 9, Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 261–280. New York: Academic Press. , that the frequency of use of an IR construction such as (1) with a directive illocutionary meaning has resulted in the “compression of the inference” from the literal meaning of the utterance — the question about A’s abilities — to its indirect directive meaning. For them, considering that a given ISA construction is highly standardized for the performance of a type of ISA means that the inferential path from the literal to the indirect illocutionary meaning of the expression has been short-circuited; this enables, in the case of a Can you VP? IR, A to infer “[S’s] requestive illocutionary intent without having to identify the literal intent of questioning” (Bach and Harnish 1979Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: MIT Press.: 198).

Following Bach and Harnish (1979)Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: MIT Press., to avoid any confusion, I will not employ conventionality in two different senses. Rather, I will only use conventional(ity) to refer to conventions of means and standardization to refer to differences in the degree to which an ISA construction makes its ISA meaning more or less transparent for the interpreter.33.Note that Brown and Levinson (1987Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 132; 290), following Morgan (1978)Morgan, Jerry L. 1978 “Two types of convention in indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol 9, Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 261–280. New York: Academic Press. , use the term conventionalization to refer to the diachronic process of standardization.

In addition to the two criteria that we have discussed above, i.e., conventionality of means and standardization, a third notion is required to satisfactorily account for the variety of constructions that can be used in the performance of ISAs. To illustrate, while the following two utterances involve the same convention of means about A’s abilities and are elaborations on the same Can you…? construction, they differ in the extent to which they make their indirect request illocutionary meaning salient.

This is what I called illocutionary force salience (Ruytenbeek 2021Ruytenbeek, Nicolas 2021 Indirect Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : Chapter 3). The idea is that, while the propositional content of these two utterances is identical, the presence of the request Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) please in (12) makes its IR meaning more salient compared to that of (1) (this prediction was experimentally demonstrated in Clark’s (1979)Clark, Herbert H. 1979 “Responding to indirect speech acts.” Cognitive Psychology 11: 430–477. studies about IR interpretation by local merchants over the phone). Interestingly, the notion of illocutionary force salience both applies to direct and indirect SA realizations. For example, considering the pair of utterances in (5)–(13), it can be argued that the presence of please makes the request meaning of the construction more salient in the sense that the same utterance without the particle does not leave out other possible interpretations, such as a command or a piece of advice.

More recently, Holtgraves and Robinson (2020)Holtgraves, Thomas, and Caleb Robinson 2020 “Emoji can facilitate recognition of conveyed indirect meaning.” PloS one 15(4): e0232361. have shown that the presence of an emoji can help interpreters disambiguate utterances with a potentially sarcastic meaning. This suggests that emoji can function as IFIDs, thus increasing the degree of salience of the (possibly indirect) illocutionary meaning of utterances.

2.2.2Degrees of indirectness

At this stage, regardless of the exact definition of indirectness that we assume, a SA either is direct or indirect. However, there is also a graded notion of indirectness available in the literature (see, for instance, Leech 1983Leech, Geoffrey 1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Routledge.; Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, and Elite Olshtain 1984 “Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP).” Applied Linguistics 5: 198–212. ; Blum-Kulka 1987Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. ; and Blum-Kulka et al. 1989Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper (eds) 1989 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: Ablex.). According to this view, direct and indirect refer to different positions on a scale of (in)directness. If we apply this notion to the SA of request, for example, the direct SA constructions according to the original speech act theoretic definition, i.e., imperative requests, would be considered as “more direct” compared to the request forms originally classified as indirect, such as Can you VP?.

A scholar who adopted this view is Leech (1983: 108), who was interested in the effect of “using a more and more indirect kind of illocution” on the degree of perceived politeness.44.Contrary to what Blum-Kulka (1987Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. : 133) claimed, while Searle (1975)Searle, John R. 1975 “Indirect speech acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press. suggested that the amount of interpretative work can be expected to be higher for requests performed by means of, for example, negative state remarks compared to ability questions, he never explicitly endorsed a graded notion of (in)directness. Nor did Brown and Levinson (1987)Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. assume that indirectness comes by degrees. The focus was thus on how participants perceived varying degrees of (in)directness (Blum-Kulka 1987Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. : 132). The rationale for a scale of request indirectness was that “forms [can be] ordered approximately according to […] the obviousness of the directive” (Ervin-Tripp 1976Ervin-Tripp, Susan 1976 “Is Sybil there? the structure of some American English directives.” Language in Society. 5: 25–66. : 29) or to their “degree of illocutionary transparency” (Blum-Kulka 1987Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. : 133). Accordingly, the longer “the inferential path needed to arrive at an utterance’s illocutionary point,” the more indirect the SA performed with this utterance (Blum-Kulka 1987Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. : 133). A positive correlation is thus postulated between the degree of indirectness and the amount of inferential work for the interpreter. In the case of the most direct SA realizations, the illocutionary force is indicated, for example, at the level of the sentence-type used, while for the most indirect forms the illocutionary force has to be inferred.

Following the view that (in)directness comes in degrees, a variety of IR realizations were arranged on a cline of increasing indirectness, ranging from imperatives to negative state remarks, with standardized IR constructions of the Can you VP? type in between. While early proposals distinguished between only six request realization types (Ervin-Tripp 1976Ervin-Tripp, Susan 1976 “Is Sybil there? the structure of some American English directives.” Language in Society. 5: 25–66. : 29–45), later classifications included eight (House and Kasper 1981House, Juliane, and Gabriele Kasper 1981 “Politeness markers in English and German.” In Conversational Routine, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 157–185. The Hague: Mouton. : 163–164) or nine categories (Blum-Kulka 1987Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. : 133).

Despite its apparent appeal, the operationalization of (in)directness in terms of relative degrees faces a number of problems. From the perspective of the amount of inferential work for the interpreter, some contrasts do indeed seem a priori plausible; imperative requests, for example, should be easier to interpret as requests relative to negative state remarks (cf. the category of hints in Ervin-Tripp (1976Ervin-Tripp, Susan 1976 “Is Sybil there? the structure of some American English directives.” Language in Society. 5: 25–66. : 42–45) and House and Kasper (1981House, Juliane, and Gabriele Kasper 1981 “Politeness markers in English and German.” In Conversational Routine, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 157–185. The Hague: Mouton. : 163)). For other contrasts, however, it is less clear whether one construction, e.g., ability interrogatives, should be perceived as more indirect than the other, e.g., want declaratives. In fact, the defendants of what can be called the graded indirectness hypothesis rarely made explicit the criteria they used to position different constructions on the (in)directness scale. This is understandable in Blum-Kulka’s (1987)Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1987 “Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. study, as relative positions on the cline of (in)directness were determined on the basis of respondents’ directness ratings.

Directives set aside, the definition of (in)directness that has been applied to the SA of complaining in previous work (House and Kasper 1981House, Juliane, and Gabriele Kasper 1981 “Politeness markers in English and German.” In Conversational Routine, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 157–185. The Hague: Mouton. : 160–161; Trosborg 1995Trosborg, Anna 1995 Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints, and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. : 315–372) proves even more problematic. As pointed out by Decock and Depraetere (2018)Decock, Sofie, and llse Depraetere 2018 “(In)directness and complaints: A reassessment.” Journal of Pragmatics 132: 33–46. , in addition to the notion of the transparency with which the illocutionary meaning is conveyed (assuming greater inferential work for more indirect SA realizations), the “assumed degree of face-threat” (2018Decock, Sofie, and llse Depraetere 2018 “(In)directness and complaints: A reassessment.” Journal of Pragmatics 132: 33–46. : 35) for the recipient of the complaint also plays a role. For instance, according to House and Kasper (1981House, Juliane, and Gabriele Kasper 1981 “Politeness markers in English and German.” In Conversational Routine, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 157–185. The Hague: Mouton. : 160–161), the complaint performed by means of (14) is more indirect compared to that performed with (15).

While, as House and Kasper proposed, in both (14) and (15) S indeed explicitly asserts something, the propositional content of (15) does not express the complainable, i.e., the negative event that S is complaining about. In face-threat terms, (15) is more likely to be perceived by A as being offensive — at least in Western cultures — (Decock and Depraetere 2018Decock, Sofie, and llse Depraetere 2018 “(In)directness and complaints: A reassessment.” Journal of Pragmatics 132: 33–46. : 35), but that has nothing to do with the degree of illocutionary transparency or the hypothesized amount of interpretative work for A. In the same vein, Trosborg (1995Trosborg, Anna 1995 Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints, and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. : 314) draws a contrast between a “straightforward accusation” (direct complaint) and utterances that “only indirectly express [S’s] ill feelings towards [A].” Here, the propositional content of the intended complaint SA is different in both cases, which makes an (in)directness-based comparison irrelevant. The upshot of this discussion is that complaint (in)directness, as adopted by House and Kasper (1981)House, Juliane, and Gabriele Kasper 1981 “Politeness markers in English and German.” In Conversational Routine, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 157–185. The Hague: Mouton. and Trosborg (1995)Trosborg, Anna 1995 Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints, and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. , is a (largely unclear) combination of illocutionary meaning transparency and face-threat considerations. A possible solution would be to replace it, as Decock and Depraetere (2018)Decock, Sofie, and llse Depraetere 2018 “(In)directness and complaints: A reassessment.” Journal of Pragmatics 132: 33–46. did, with a graded notion of illocutionary transparency of the complaint meaning.

A third issue is that the graded notion of (in)directness only seems viable if it is operationalized in a context-dependent manner. That is, unlike the traditional binary definition of indirectness, it is virtually impossible to determine a priori all possible contrasts in terms of relative (in)directness between candidate constructions. Moreover, the validity of a particular scale of (in)directness would require systematic empirical investigation. That being said, the view that different realizations of a given SA type can be ordered on a cline of (in)directness has made an important contribution by allowing testable predictions about the degree of interpretive effort associated with different SA realizations.

2.2.3Cross-cultural research on indirectness

Under the impulse of Brown and Levinson (1987)Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. and Blum-Kulka et al. (1989)Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper (eds) 1989 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: Ablex., scholars have explored the (in)direct realizations of different speech acts across different languages. Most, if not all, of the studies that I will briefly address below adopt a graded view of (in)directness, whether at the level of individual SA realizations or at the level of groups of speakers. Using either authentic data from corpora or natural interactions or data from discourse completion tasks, these authors document speakers’ preference for more or less (in)direct speech act realizations. In these studies, indirectness is often approached as a type of politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson 1987Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; more on this in Section 3).

A tendency in cross-cultural pragmatic research on indirectness has been to include an English lingua-culture as a standard of comparison (e.g., Kerkam 2015Kerkam, Zainab M. 2015 A comparison of Arabic and English Directness and Indirectness: Cross-Cultural Politeness. PhD dissertation, Sheffield Hallam University. on Arabic; Ngor-To Yeung 2000Ngor-To Yeung, Lorrita 2000 “The question of Chinese indirectness: A comparison of Chinese and English participative decision-making discourse.” Multilingua 19 (3): 221–264. on Chinese; Larina 2008Larina, Tatiana 2008 “Directness, imposition and politeness in English and Russian.” Cambridge ESOL: Research Notes 33: 33–38. on Russian; Ogiermann 2009Ogiermann, Eva 2009 “Politeness and in-directness across cultures: A comparison of English, German, Polish and Russian requests.” Journal of Politeness Research 5: 189–216. on German, Polish and Russian; Spees 1994Spees, Hiroko 1994 “A cross-cultural study of indirectness.” Issues in Applied Linguistics 5(2): 231–253. on Japanese; Tannen 1981Tannen, Deborah 1981 “Indirectness in discourse: Ethnicity as conversational style.” Discourse Processes 4 (3): 221–238. on Greek; Hidalgo-Downing et al. 2014Hidalgo-Downing, Laura, Raquel Hidalgo-Downing, and Angela Downing 2014 “Strategies of (in)directness in Spanish speakers’ production of complaints and disagreements in English and Spanish.” In The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse: Applications and Implications, ed. by María Angeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco Gonzálvez García, and Angela Downing Rothwell, 261–284. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. and Márquez Reiter et al. 2005Márquez Reiter, Rosina, Isobel Rainey, and Fulcher, Glenn 2005 “A comparative study of certainty and conventional indirectness: Evidence from British English and Peninsular Spanish.” Applied linguistics 26 (1): 1–31. on Spanish). However, such a reference to English is not systematic and there also exist monocultural studies, such as Le Pair (2005)Le Pair, Rob 2005 “Politeness in The Netherlands: Indirect requests.” In Politeness in Europe, ed. by Leo Hickey, and Miranda Stewart, 66–81. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. and Schouten (2007)Schouten, Barbara C. 2007 “Self-construals and conversational indirectness: A Dutch perspective”. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 31 (3): 293–297. on Dutch and Pizziconi (2009)Pizziconi, Barbara 2009 “Stereotyping communicative styles in and out of the language and culture classroom: Japanese indirectness, ambiguity and vagueness.” In Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning, ed. by Gomez Moron, Reyes, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucia Fernandez Amaya, and Maria De la O Hernandez Lopez, 221–254. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. on Japanese. In addition, the last few years have seen a growing number of studies adopting a cross-cultural comparative perspective, such as Chen and Wang (2021)Chen, Xi, and Jiayi Wang 2021 “First order and second order indirectness in Korean and Chinese.” Journal of Pragmatics 178: 315–328. , who investigated indirectness in the speech of Chinese and Korean speakers, and Venuti (2020)Venuti, Ilaria 2020 “Politeness, indirectness and efficacy in Italian and German requestive speech acts.” PhD dissertation, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia., who focused on IRs in German and Italian (see also Rygg (2012)Rygg, Kristin 2012 “Direct and indirect communicative styles: A study in sociopragmatics and intercultural communication based on interview discourse with Norwegian and Japanese business executives.” PhD dissertation, University of Bergen. on Norwegian and Japanese).

A large body of research specifically concerns (in)directness in directives (Benzdira 2023Benzdira, Halima 2023 Cross-cultural Realization of the Speech Act of Requests: Case Study of Algerian Ph.D. Students. PhD dissertation, Manchester Metropolitan University. on Algerian Arabic; Ngor-To Yeung 2000Ngor-To Yeung, Lorrita 2000 “The question of Chinese indirectness: A comparison of Chinese and English participative decision-making discourse.” Multilingua 19 (3): 221–264. ; Zhang 1995Zhang, Yanyin 1995 “Indirectness in Chinese requesting.” In Pragmatics of Chinese as a Native and Target Language, ed. by Gabriele Kasper, 69–118. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. on Chinese; Byon 2006Byon, Andrew Sangpil 2006 “The role of linguistic indirectness and honorifics in achieving linguistic politeness in Korean requests.” Journal of Politeness Research 2 (2): 247–276. and Yu 2011Yu, Kyong-Ae 2011 “Culture-specific concepts of politeness: Indirectness and politeness in English, Hebrew and Korean requests.” Intercultural Pragmatics 8 (3): 385–409. on Korean; Lwanga-Lumu 1999Lwanga-Lumu, Joy Christine 1999 “Politeness and indirectness revisited.” South African Journal of African Languages 19 (2): 83–92. on Luganda; Upadhyay 2003Upadhyay, Shiv R. 2003 “Nepali requestive acts: Linguistic indirectness and politeness reconsidered.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (10–11): 1651–1677. on Nepali; Ruytenbeek 2019Ruytenbeek, Nicolas 2019 “Lexical and morpho-syntactic modification of student requests: An empirical contribution to the study of im/politeness in French e-mail speech acts.” Lexique 24: 29–47. , 2020Ruytenbeek, Nicolas 2020 “Do indirect requests communicate politeness? An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication.” Journal of Politeness Research 16 (1): 111–142. and Manno 2002Manno, Giuseppe 2002 “La politesse et l’indirection: Un essai de synthèse.” Langage & Société 100 (2): 5–47. on French; Marti 2006Marti, Leyla 2006 “Indirectness and politeness in Turkish–German bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests.” Journal of Pragmatics 38 (11): 1836–1869. on Turkish; Ruzickova 2007Ruzickova, Elena 2007 “Strong and mild requestive hints and positive-face redress in Cuban Spanish.” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (6): 1170–1202. on Spanish; Wierzbicka 2003Wierzbicka, Anna 2003 Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. : Chapter 2 on Polish). Here, too, cross-cultural comparisons can be found: De Geer and Tulviste (2002)De Geer, Boel, and Tiia Tulviste 2002 “Behaviour regulation in the family context in Estonia and Sweden.” Pragmatics 12(3): 329–346. documented IRs (and requests in general) in Swedish and Estonian, Veres-Guśpiel (2020)Veres-Guśpiel, Agnieska 2020 “Social contexts of indirect requests in Polish and Hungarian.” New Horizons in English Studies 5 (1): 24–47. IRs in Polish and Hungarian, Márquez Reiter (2002)Márquez Reiter, Rosina 2002 “A contrastive study of conventional indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish.” Pragmatics 12 (2): 135–151. in Uruguayan and Peninsular Spanish, and Marsily (2018)Marsily, Aurélie 2018 “Directness vs. indirectness: A contrastive analysis of pragmatic equivalence in Spanish and French request formulations.” Languages in Contrast 18 (1): 122–144. in French and Spanish. Another example is Yu (2011)Yu, Kyong-Ae 2011 “Culture-specific concepts of politeness: Indirectness and politeness in English, Hebrew and Korean requests.” Intercultural Pragmatics 8 (3): 385–409. , who analyzed the relationship between (in)directness and politeness in request realizations in English, Hebrew, and Korean. In Sifianou (1993)Sifianou, Maria 1993 “Off-record indirectness and the notion of imposition”. Multilingua 12 (1): 69–80. , off-record indirectness was investigated both in Greek and in English. In the footsteps of Ogiermann (2009)Ogiermann, Eva 2009 “Politeness and in-directness across cultures: A comparison of English, German, Polish and Russian requests.” Journal of Politeness Research 5: 189–216. , Urbanik (2017)Urbanik, Pawel K. 2017 “Requests in Polish and Norwegian informal conversation: A comparative study of grammatical and pragmatic patterns.” PhD dissertation, University of Oslo. explored directives in Polish and Norwegian. As far as other SA types are concerned, in Chinese, for instance, indirectness has been investigated in general (Zhou and Zhang 2022Zhou, Ling, and Shaojie Zhang 2022 “A multifunctional analysis of off-record indirectness in Chinese interactions.” Language Sciences 90: 101459. ), as well as in evaluations (Chen and Wang 2021Chen, Xi, and Jiayi Wang 2021 “First order and second order indirectness in Korean and Chinese.” Journal of Pragmatics 178: 315–328. ), proposals, and disagreements (Ngor-To Yeung 2000Ngor-To Yeung, Lorrita 2000 “The question of Chinese indirectness: A comparison of Chinese and English participative decision-making discourse.” Multilingua 19 (3): 221–264. ). The indirectness of both requests and criticisms has been analyzed in Russian (Kulbayeva 2020Kulbayeva, Aisulu 2020 “Balancing power and solidarity through indirectness: A case study of Russian and Kazakh meeting chairs.” Journal of Politeness Research 16 (2): 159–191. ).

Although not exhaustive, this overview shows that empirical studies on the topic of SA indirectness in the world’s languages are far from systematic. Hopefully, the coming years will see more comparative work between distant languages and cultures, as well as research targeting different types of SA within specific lingua-cultures.