On the Relationship between Indirectness and Politeness

DOI

10.2991/icsshe-16.2016.104How to use a DOI?

Keywords

indirectness, indirect speech act, implicature, politeness

Abstract

It is generally believed that moderate indirectness is better and more easily acceptable than blunt and direct speech acts among both close friends and other acquaintances in everyday conversations, especially among strangers. Such indirect speech acts mean comparatively more politeness for the speech acts recipient. It is not at all an unusual phenomenon in everyday life. This paper focuses on exposure of how indirect speech act coming into being in terms of speech act theory and cooperative principles. It illustrates essential causes from the perspective of politeness, showing that communicators can utilize indirect speech acts to help convey their politeness to speech acts receivers so as to accomplish communicative purposes, facilitate interpersonal communication and maintain interpersonal relationship with mutual respect, to certain extent.

Copyright

© 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jimei Li
PY  - 2016/07
DA  - 2016/07
TI  - On the Relationship between Indirectness and Politeness
BT  - Proceedings of the 2016 2nd International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 410
EP  - 413
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsshe-16.2016.104
DO  - 10.2991/icsshe-16.2016.104
ID  - Li2016/07
ER  -