Indirectness

1. Introduction Communication is a crucial part of our daily life. We have to admit that how to communicate with others is a form of art. It is easy to notice that use different forms to express the same meaning may have different responses from others. In verbal communication, we often utter our intention in a roundabout way rather than speaking it out directly. This interesting phenomenon is regarded as indirectness which widely exists in daily communication. Searle (1979:31) defines indirect speech acts as ‘cases in which one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another’. For example, can you pass me the pen? When people utter this sentence, it is not only a question but request the addressee to pass the pen. Of course, it is of great importance to realize that indirect speech acts also have relations to politeness and cultures. Different cultures form different thinking patterns, value systems and cognitive style, so the realizations of indirect speech acts must be very different in English and Chinese. In this paper, I show that what indirect speech acts is and the similarities and differences in Chinese indirectness and English indirectness.

This paper begins with an overall survey about indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts associated with politeness will be explored in following part. The universality and diversity in Chinese indirectness and English indirectness and how culture contributes to the diversity of indirect speech acts in Chinese and English will be illustrated in the final part.

2. Notion of indirect speech acts

As we all know, speech act theory is the basis of indirect speech acts. Speech act theory was first proposed by Austin. In his theory of speech acts, he makes a distinction between constative sentence and performative sentence. Constative sentences are utterances that are used to state or describe things. By contrast, as Austin (1962: 6-7) points out that performative sentence ‘indicates