Directness and Indirectness Across Cultures

Sara Mills, Karen Grainger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137340399
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

This book analyses the complex relationship between directness, indirectness, politeness and impoliteness. Definitions of directness and indirectness are discussed and problematised from a discursive theoretical perspective.

1

Introduction: Language, Culture, (Im)politeness and (In)directness

1.1Introduction

This book focuses on the complex relationship between indirectness, directness, politeness and impoliteness. This complexity most clearly shows up when we examine these phenomena across languages and cultures. It is for this reason that our examination of directness and indirectness focuses on both cross- and inter-cultural language use.² Our primary aim is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of politeness phenomena, and the relationship between (in)directness and (im)politeness,¹ if there is any; however, we have a secondary aim of helping to improve intercultural communication, by focusing on those elements within speech that might lead to misunderstanding. Directness and indirectness seem to be two of the elements which most often lead to breakdown of communication between members of different linguistic or cultural groups, and lead to judgements of people from a particular culture as being ‘rude’ or ‘distant’. Throughout this book, we engage with research on directness and indirectness in various languages and cultures, as well as introducing our own data and analysis of directness and indirectness across cultures. We try, as far as possible, to question some of the assumptions that there have been in the past about culture, (in)directness and politeness.

Often research on directness and indirectness focuses on the analysis of indirectness in English and assumes that this is the style of speech that most typifies English politeness (Hickey and Stewart, 2005; Stewart, 2005). Thus a direct statement might be considered something like ‘Give me a lift to the cinema’, which would normally be interpreted as fairly brusque in English (unless it is between very close friends, or if it is being used ironically or in the context of talk marked as banter). An indirect statement might be something like ‘Could you possibly give me a lift to the cinema’, where conventional indirectness (‘could you’) modifies the force of the utterance. In English particularly, hints (or off record statements) are also considered as an important part of indirectness; for example, in a sentence such as ‘Well, you’re going to the cinema tonight, aren’t you? And my partner’s using the car tonight’, the speaker relies on the interlocutor to infer that they are hinting that they would like a lift. This allows the hearer to choose to pick up on the inference and offer a lift, or to choose to ignore the inference completely.

The assumption in much traditional politeness research tends to be that the more indirect an utterance is, the more polite it is (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987). Directness is therefore considered to be in essence impolite. However, this assumption appears to be based on the politeness norms of elite groups of English speakers and turns out to be problematic when one looks at the way directness is used, evaluated and understood by interactants in other communities, cultures and contexts. Even in English, the direct form ‘Give me a lift’ would be considered the more polite and appropriate form, if for example, it were used between close friends who are used to giving each other lifts, or if it were used humorously. The indirect form ‘Could you possibly give me a lift?’ or a hint, might, in similar contexts between close friends, be interpreted as indicating a very distant relationship between interlocutors and might therefore be interpreted as inappropriate and impolite. In this book, therefore, we argue that the relationship between (in)directness and (im)politeness is not straightforward in English, and is even more complex when one looks at non-English-speaking cultures.

Whilst conventional indirectness, such as ‘Can you help me?’ has been the focus of much research on directness, it is not the primary focus of this book, as we would argue that most speakers and hearers, in English and other languages, do not in fact recognise the function of conventional indirectness as indirect. Whilst we do discuss conventional indirectness, our main focus in this book is on what Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) term ‘off record’ speech, that is indirectness that is realised through the use of hints and statements, the implications of which have to be unpacked in order for the meaning of the utterances to be worked out by the hearer.

In addition, theorists of indirectness have often made the assumption that indirectness is more refined or sophisticated than directness. For example, Coolidge and Wynn (2013) argue that it developed later in evolutionary and in developmental terms, and therefore should be seen as indicative of a higher level of thought process and awareness of others. They argue that a theory of mind is necessary for the use of indirectness, and not necessarily for the use of directness. This is an ideological assumption that directness is simple and unsophisticated; it depends very much on the linguistic community whether a style of speech is considered sophisticated and whether it indicates a concern for, or an awareness of, others.

In addition to the problem of ethnocentricity, research on indirectness has tended to be rather limited in terms of the speech acts studied.³ There is a tendency to focus on requests, as if this is the principal context with which indirectness is associated. In a similar way, when directness is discussed, it is assumed that directness is largely used for commands. Furthermore, the type of indirectness that is often discussed is ‘conventional indirectness’, which is arguably not indirect at all, when it refers to English usage (as we illustrate in Chapter 2). A further problem that we hope to address in this book is the assumption that everyone recognises indirectness, and also that they agree on the values associated with the use of indirectness and directness. One person’s frankness might be considered boorishness by another; one person’s indirectness might be interpreted as prevarication and indecisiveness by another. We engage with all of these issues throughout this book in order to develop a more complex view of the relationship between language, culture, politeness, directness and indirectness. As well as engaging with these issues in research on indirectness and politeness, we aim to develop a form of analysis that can deal with a new more discursively oriented view of culture, and that can spell out more clearly what generalisations can be made about the language use that is considered appropriate within particular cultural groups (see Linguistic Politeness Research Group, ed. 2011; Kadar and Mills, 2011a; Mills, forthcoming; van der Bom and Mills, 2015).

In this chapter, we first discuss the theoretical context of our work. We start by giving a brief account of Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) work on politeness and the problems associated with their work. This account contextualises our discussion of the theoretical approach that we take: the discursive approach to politeness. We detail what a discursive approach to the analysis of languages and cultures would focus on, for example, linguistic ideologies and the variability within cultures. We then discuss the relationship between politeness and culture, and set out the way that traditional accounts of language and culture in relation to politeness have focused on binary pairs of terms, assigning language groups to one of the pairs: discernment/volition; collectivist/individualist and positive and negative cultures. We question whether it is possible to argue that cultures can be so easily fitted into one of these binary pairs and suggest instead that these terms can only be used as a consideration of cultures and languages on a cline, and then only in relation to ideologies of elite culture (Mills forthcoming; Kadar and Mills, 2013). Then, we describe our methodology and approach to the analysis of the data, which stems from this discursive theoretical approach. Finally, we describe the structure of the book as a whole.

1.2Theoretical context: traditional and discursive approaches to the analysis of politeness

1.2.1Brown and Levinson’s work

Brown and Levinson (1978; 1987) were the first to propose a systematic model of politeness and, whilst there has been much criticism of their work, many theorists still adhere to a great deal of their terminology and concepts, whilst modifying some elements of their theorisation. Brown and Levinson proposed that politeness can be described as a concern with indicating closeness or distance from the interlocutor; it is a way of mitigating the potential imposition that is involved in such speech acts as requests or criticism. For them, politeness is largely strategic, a calculation that speakers make when interacting with others about issues of social distance, power relations, and the ‘cost’ of the imposition on the other. From this calculation, the speaker works out what they need to ‘pay’ the other person. For Brown and Levinson, individuals need to defend their ‘face’, that is, a (largely) positive self-image which develops within interaction through negotiation with others. If others maintain your face, you, in turn, will maintain their face. Face threatening acts (FTAs) are classified by Brown and Levinson as any actions that potentially disturb the balance of face maintenance among interactants. For example, requests can be categorised as face threatening as they require the addressee to either do something for the speaker or to refuse the request. Whether the request is acceded to or refused, for Brown and Levinson the interlocutor’s face is potentially at risk. Politeness, for Brown and Levinson, is therefore seen as the mitigation of such potential threats to face.⁴

Brown and Levinson characterised politeness as consisting of two elements: negative and positive politeness. Negative politeness is largely concerned with not imposing on the other person, and indicating deference and respect towards them. In this view, apologising would be categorised as negative politeness, as it is seen to be recognising the needs and wishes of the other person, putting that other person first and indicating that the other person will not be imposed upon. Positive politeness is concerned with stressing the closeness between the speaker and the hearer and indicating that the needs of the hearer and the speaker are very similar. Paying someone a compliment or telling them a joke is characterised as positive politeness, as both of these are seen to be orienting to the common ground between interactants.

1.2.2Problems with Brown and Levinson’s approach

Many critics have drawn attention to shortcomings in Brown and Levinson’s work, for example, the fact that they focus on making universalistic statements, that is statements about politeness that they see as true of all language groups (Kadar and Mills, 2011a). Brown and Levinson argued that individual language groups differed in the extent to which they used positive or negative politeness, but that in essence, all languages subscribed to the same structural features and system of politeness. In recent years, however, this traditional approach has come under scrutiny, largely because, although this model seems to be more or less adequate to describe stereotypical English politeness, it certainly is not an effective model for analysing, for example, East Asian languages or Arabic (Matsumoto, 1989; Kadar and Mills, 2011; Grainger et al., 2015).⁵

A further problem with Brown and Levinson’s work, and of particular importance in the context of this book, is that they also claim that indirectness is closely associated with politeness, and directness is closely associated with impoliteness. Brown and Levinson argued that there is a scale of politeness, ranging from going off record and avoidance of speaking at the most polite end of the scale, to the directness of bald on record utterances at the least polite or impolite end of the scale.⁶ For them, going off record is regarded as the most polite form, next to silence. Furthermore, they seem to treat ‘indirectness’ and going off record differently. Indirectness is explained as a ‘special case’ of negative politeness, and therefore is less polite than going off record. For Brown and Levinson, when someone is indirect, for example, when requesting something, they give their interlocutor the option of not recognising or acknowledging the request. Therefore, indirect forms do not constrain the hearer in terms of their response to the request and allow them some freedom of action. For example, if a speaker says: ‘I wonder if you could possibly lend me that book?’ using a relatively indirect form rather than the relatively direct form: ‘Can I borrow that book?’ or the more direct form ‘I want to read that book’ or ‘Lend me that book’, they offer the hearer more options in terms of being able to refuse the request. In a sense, the more indirect form already has the potential of refusal embedded within it. This is a highly elaborated form, which signals to the interlocutor that the speaker recognises that they are making a request, with a recognition of its potential ‘harm’ to the hearer, and also signalling to the hearer that they have the option to refuse. All of these elements are highly conventionalised in English; it is therefore difficult to describe the intention or the impact of this type of indirectness in particular interactions. Hinting can also be seen as part of indirectness, but for Brown and Levinson is ‘off record’ rather than ‘conventional’. Thus, for example, someone might request the loan of a book by simply saying ‘That looks an interesting book’, or ‘Oh, you’ve got a copy of that book’, expecting the interlocutor to ‘take up’ the hint and intuit the statement as a veiled request (see Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of indirectness).

Overall, Brown and Levinson’s treatment assumes that using indirectness in English seems to signal an acknowledgement that making a request involves potentially face threatening behaviour, and because this difficulty has been indicated to the hearer, refusal does not threaten the speaker’s or the hearer’s face, or at least threatens it less. We could argue that indirectness is nevertheless potentially just as coercive as a bald on record utterance in some circumstances, as, if the speaker uses this form of indirectness as politeness, refusing such a request might be seen as not acknowledging the politeness of the request. This type of indirectness is characterised by Brown and Levinson as universal; others have seen it as stereotypically English (Wierzbicka, 2003). However, others have argued that this type of indirectness is associated with stereotypically elite forms of politeness in English only and have also seen that there may be some indirectly indexical relationship between indirectness and gender (Holmes, 1995; Mills, 2003).

Many theorists have drawn attention to the fact that whilst for elite English, indirectness is seen to be the most polite form, in other languages, indirectness may in fact be considered impolite. Kerkam (forthcoming) has shown that in Arabic, indirectness is rarely used for the purposes of being polite, as directness is seen as the more expected or appropriate form for requests and excuses. Indirectness used in these contexts would indicate a social or affective distance between the interlocutors, and therefore could give rise to an interpretation of impoliteness. Kerkam also shows that when indirectness is strategically used by interlocutors, it tends to be used for Face Threatening Acts. She has shown that criticising and blaming are often achieved through indirect means, where speakers and hearers both recognise that an abstracted, generalised indirect utterance, functions as a particularised criticism of the hearer. One of her examples is of a Libyan woman, residing in the UK talking to a female friend in Arabic. The friend says when commenting on her friend’s children’s clothes: ‘British children’s clothes are not very nice, are they?’ This could be seen as a generalised criticism of British fashion for children. However, because of the conventions in relation to producing and understanding indirectness in Arabic, both of the participants understand that this is a very particular criticism of the hearer, for not only their taste in clothes but also potentially for their orientation to foreign cultures. Within the context of Arabic, indirectness has very different values associated with it, and functions in very different ways to the ways in which it functions in elite English.

Indirectness is not an agreed-upon term in all languages; thus what counts as indirect in English – for example, conventional indirectness, such as ‘Could you open the window?’, might not be seen as indirect at all in some languages (Wierzbicka, 2003). It may also not necessarily be categorised as indirect by all English speakers (Kerkam, forthcoming). The supposed widespread use of indirectness for refusals in East Asian languages, should be viewed as conventionalised, and is often interpreted by native speakers of these languages as fairly straightforward, rather than indirect. Indirectness, within these contexts is therefore not associated with an indication of politeness.

Thus, indirectness should be seen to have a complex relationship with politeness, and it is clear that particular languages do not necessarily view or use indirectness in the same way as it is interpreted in English. Furthermore, not all English speakers agree that indirectness is the most polite form. This question of how indirectness is defined and evaluated by speakers from various cultures is a central concern of this book and is dealt with in detail in chapters 4–6.

1.2.3A discursive theoretical approach to the analysis of politeness

In this section we discuss the theoretical basis that underpins the work discussed in this book. We firstly examine the development of the discursive theoretical approach, in particular its focus on linguistic ideologies and a discursive approach to variability within and across cultures. We should stress that there is no single discursive approach and that there are many theorists working within a broadly speaking discursive post-Brown and Levinson framework. What we outline in this section and in the book as a whole is simply one of those theoretical configurations.

The discursive approach to the analysis of politeness developed because of a dissatisfaction with many aspects of Brown and Levinson’s theorising and analysis. Following on from Eelen’s (2001) thoroughgoing critique of the work of Brown and Levinson and other politeness theorists, the discursive approach has attempted to develop a form of analysis that either modifies their work or tries to develop new models of analysis and interpretation (Linguistic Politeness Research Group, 2011; van der Bom and Mills, 2015; Locher and Watts, 2008).

Instead of making universal statements about politeness use, and developing a global model for the analysis of politeness, the discursive approach focuses on the way that context, resources and social forces/ideologies determine the possible meanings and interpretations of politeness. These are the elements which, in fact, determine whether an utterance is considered by interactants to be polite or impolite. Politeness and impoliteness are only those that are judged by interactants to be so, but interactants do not make these judgements in a vacuum. Particular forms will be enregistered as polite or impolite (Agha, 2007; Christie, 2013). That is, through dint of being used within particular contexts, they will begin to pick up particular values and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription Conventions
• 1 Introduction: Language, Culture, (Im)politeness and (In)directness
• 2 Theoretical Perspectives on Indirectness
• 3 Theoretical Perspectives on Directness
• 4 Zimbabwean English and British English: A Case Study of Directness and Indirectness Across Cultures
• 5 Situated Directness and Indirectness: Monolingual English Speakers
• 6 Linguistic Ideologies: Bilingual Speakers’ Evaluations of Indirectness and Directness
• 7 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index