'Coffee is not coffee at twelve o'clock at night' : exploring the motivations for speaking indirectly
This thesis presents a detailed theoretical and empirical discussion of indirect speech acts with a focus on off-record indirectness (ORI), a linguistic strategy through which a speaker deliberately conveys to the addressee two related meanings - a literal, direct meaning and an indirect meaning. Due to the pragmatic ambiguity of the ORI utterance, the indirect meaning can be plausibly denied in favour of a literal interpretation, if necessary. This thesis focuses on strategic uses of ORI - instances in which a speaker intentionally uses an ambiguous off-record utterance. Several theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain strategic uses of off-record indirectness, each of which attributes different motivations to ORI and assumes different functional, contextual, or interpersonal conditions under which ORI is optimal. This thesis explores strategic motivations for ORI by closely examining a number of compelling and, at times, competing theoretical accounts. In Chapter 2, several accounts of ORI are summarised, contextualised, and scrutinised and a novel theoretical categorisation is proposed. Chapters 3 through 7 focus on three theories of ORI - Politeness Theory (PT), the Strategic Speaker approach
Soltys, Jessica Meryl
applied linguistics ; experimental pragmatics ; pragmatics ; politeness ; indirect speech ; implicature
'Coffee is not coffee at twelve o'clock at night' : exploring the motivations for speaking indirectly. This thesis presents a detailed theoretical and empirical discussion of indirect speech acts with a focus on off-record indirectness (ORI), a linguistic strategy through which a speaker deliberately conveys to the addressee two related meanings - a literal, direct meaning and an indirect meaning. Due to the pragmatic ambiguity of the ORI utterance, the indirect meaning can be plausibly denied in favour of a literal interpretation, if necessary. This thesis focuses on strategic uses of ORI - instances in which a speaker intentionally uses an ambiguous off-record utterance. Several theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain strategic uses of off-record indirectness, each of which attributes different motivations to ORI and assumes different functional, contextual, or interpersonal conditions under which ORI is optimal. This thesis explores strategic motivations for ORI by closely examining a number of compelling and, at times, competing theoretical accounts. In Chapter 2, several accounts of ORI are summarised, contextualised, and scrutinised and a novel theoretical categorisation is proposed. Chapters 3 through 7 focus on three theories of ORI - Politeness Theory (PT), the Strategic Speaker approach
coffee coffee twelve clock night explore motivation speak indirectly present_detailed theoretical_empirical discussion indirect speech_act focus off record linguistic strategy speaker deliberately conveys addressee two_related meaning literal direct meaning indirect meaning due pragmatic ambiguity utterance indirect meaning plausibly deny favour literal interpretation necessary focus strategic instance speaker intentionally use ambiguous off record utterance several theoretical_account propose explain strategic off record attribute different motivation assumes different functional contextual interpersonal condition optimal explores strategic motivation closely_examine number compelling time compete theoretical_account several account summarise contextualised scrutinise novel theoretical categorisation propose focus_three theory politeness theory strategic speaker