PRAGMATICS A CHAPTER REVIEW ENTITLED INDIRECTNESS

PRAGMATICS

A CHAPTER REVIEW ENTITLED INDIRECTNESS

Written by: Luh Ketut Sri Widhiasih



I. INTRODUCTION

There are two goals of doing communication namely exchanging ideas and keeping relationship with others. Exchanging ideas could be done both verbal and written. Further, people use communication strategies in maintaining relationships, such as politeness, implicature, false promise, and so on. However, there is another strategy that people usually use to communicate to others in order to avoid embarrassment, conflict or friction so as to make the conversation runs smoothly, and also maintain a good, harmonious relationship. This strategy is called indirectness.

Read the following examples:

(1) “Frankly, I think you‘re boring.”

(2) “I’m terribly sorry. I have to leave you alone now.”

We seldom hear speaker utters (1) so honestly or directly. Unless the speakers want to end a relationship, they do not tell another person what they think of his or her frankly. In daily communication, people do not always talk out what they really think about others, especially some unpleasant or taboo in order to keep hearers’ faces.

Regarding the essential of communication styles, the writers are interested in look at more closely about indirectness. Therefore, the major reason of choosing this chapter is that indirectness is a universal phenomenon because it occurs in all natural languages (Thomas, 1995). Further, Cheng (2003) states that research on communicative style (Lakoff,1973), speech act theory (Austin, 1962), conversational implicature (Grice,1975), politeness phenomena (Brown and Levinson,1987) and discourse organization pattern (Kaplan, 1987; Kirkpatrick 1991; Scollon and Scollon 1991) have all contributed to the discussion that most communication is characterized by indirectness.



In short we would like to know the definition of indirectness; the strength and weakness of indirectness strategy of communication; the reasons why people use indirectness; the factors influence the speakers use indirectness; and the factors that could help the hearers in interpreting indirectness. Besides finding the information about indirectness, the writers also did an evaluation and a discussion on argued points. The resource that we use is from a book entitled ‘Meaning in Interaction: an Introduction to Pragmatics’ written by Jenny Thomas (1995) chapter 5 from page 119-146.


REVIEW OF THE CHAPTER

The fifth chapter of this book will explain indirectness deeply, by concerning on what indirectness is, what influences indirectness, how to measure indirectness, and the reasons why we use indirectness. As the beginning, indirectness known to be a n universal phenomenon that occurs traditionally in the use of language.

When people talk about indirectness in pragmatics, they should concern to four important things about indirectness. First, in pragmatics we only focus on intentional indirectness. Sometimes, people do indirectness because of linguistic inadequacy or performance error. Those can be occur because people cannot express words in appropriate word, temporarily forget a word, through fear, nervousness, excitement, etc. Second, indirectness is costly and risky. Indirectness is called costly because it takes more times for the speaker to produce and for the hearer to process. While, it is risky in the sense that the hearer may not understand what the speaker is getting at. Third, it is assumed that the speakers are behaving in a rational manner and given the universality of indirectness, that they obtain some social or communicative advantage or avoid some negative consequence through employing indirectness. More over, the use of indirectness itself is perfectly rational, if it enables the speaker to achieve his or her goal or to avoid unpleasantness. Forth, for the purpose of this intentional indirectness, people shall ignore the possibility that something cannot be expressed.

While, individuals and cultures vary widely in how, when, and why they use an indirect speech act in preference to a direct one. The axes governing indirectness are universal in that they capture the types of consideration likely to govern pragmatics choices in any language, but the way they are applied varies considerably from culture to culture. The main factors are the relative power of the speaker over the hearer where people tend to use a greater degree of indirectness with people who have some authority over us than to those who do not; the social distance between the speaker and the hearer where people think that they less need to use indirectness to people that have close relationship with them and vice versa; the degree to which X is rated an imposition in culture Y where people tend to use greater indirectness to do request of any big thing than small thing; and the relative rights of the speaker to make a particular demand and the whether hearer has the obligation to comply. It would be a mistake to believe that all the factors are accepted by all members of a community. When it is not accepted, people should do negotiation of pragmatics parameters.

To measure the degree of indirectness of an utterance, people can use Wilson and Sperber approach, such as by looking at the role of context, believe, background knowledge, co-text, and goals of the indirectness. When calculating the degree of indirectness we should pay attention to those things. More over different context of people will make misunderstanding toward an utterance, so it is important to know to what context the speaker or the hearer is performed. The same case also happens with the role of believe in interpreting indirectness. In relation with believe, background knowledge also play important part in interpreting indirectness. Without this background knowledge, it would be impossible to construct any propositions on which to base deductions. Moreover, the role of co-text (the linguistic context in which a particular utterance occurs) is also ease people to interpret indirectness. The important of co-text is that what has been said before constrains the way in which we interpret the response.

People cannot do something without know first what the purpose of doing that thing is. It also happens when people use indirectness, we need to know the purpose of using it. In common there are four reasons why we use indirectness. The first reason is interestingness. People use indirectness because they really enjoy with the language they use. Although it makes the interlocutor feel bored or sometimes do not catch up the meaning. Sometime people use indirectness to make what they say uninteresting. Other reason is to increase the force of one’s message. People often speak indirectly to express irony, jokes, etc. the interlocutor need to understand the meaning behind that force to do communication. This kind of indirectness often we can observe in songs, poems, jokes, plays, etc. Competing goals are the third reason why people do indirectness. When we are speaking, we have more than one goal. One goal maybe makes the interlocutor happy, and the other makes them upset, so we need to cover it in indirectness so that we can get the goals. The last but not least reason is politeness. However, we will learn further about that at its special chapter.

As a conclusion, this chapter discussed how indirectness is defined, measured, used and interpreted and the reason why people use indirectness.


EVALUATION

The chapter that was taken from a book entitled Meaning in Interaction: Introduction to Pragmatics written by Jenny Thomas. In this section, the writers try to analyze the chapter based on its structure or how the author of this chapter wrote his idea in a chapter. The writers will starts to analyze from the introduction, content, until the conclusion of this chapter. The writers will not only see from positive point of view but also the negative one.

The general point that the writers would like to talk is that they way Thomas as the author organize each point about indirectness is that each point that is explained by the authors is interrelated each other or runs smoothly. So, it was easy for the writers to get the point of indirectness.

In introduction, the author try to review previous chapter that still has relationship with this chapter. That is a good stating point. It will help the readers to link back their previous knowledge about previous chapter to get easier to understand the concept in this chapter. Also in introduction, the author gives general information about what will be discussed in the next part of the chapter. The readers will get a big picture about what will be going on the next section. The author expressed the idea in an interesting way, so that it makes the readers want to read further. Moreover, from the beginning the author also started to present their data by addressing some references to support their statement, it looks like he really knows the rule of an author. It makes it as a kind of a good introduction.

Coming to the content, the reader will find structured idea that the author list using a good numbering system. The reader will easily find which one is the part of which, etc. Moreover, the same case like in introduction also happens in the content. The author always gives general view about what will be discussed in the sub-chapter before he explained further next. The content has already answer 5W1H question about indirectness. Start from what is indirectness in pragmatics; when/where/who/why/how should use indirectness, and how to measure indirectness. The author does not forget to gives some examples to make his explanation clearer. The authors of the chapter can therefore be appreciated here for variant sentences that are used in this chapter. It seems like he is active in producing sentence to present their data smoothly. It makes the chapter more interesting to read.

Furthermore, the next analysis about the content is that the content of this chapter is rich with examples for each explanation of indirectness. However, the author does not give deep and further theoretical explanation about indirectness, such as the definition of and types of indirectness. It might be because this book only explains the basic points of indirectness as the title of the book “Meaning in Interaction: Introduction to Pragmatics”. This is the reason why the author does not give much explanation about indirectness. Giving many examples which are understandable-language used by Thomas is easy to be understood-are used to make the readers understand about indirectness although there is no much theory of indirectness explained. Meanwhile, it makes the readers to find other references about indirectness. So, the readers have to re-read this chapter for several times and find other articles to get the point and have better understanding.

The last part of this chapter is the conclusion. The writers found that the conclusion cannot cover all of the explanation of this chapter. The conclusion only restate a bit about the motivation of people use indirectness, then relate it to the explanation of the next chapter that is about politeness. For the readers that have no enough time to read this entire chapter, they will be disappointed to read this conclusion, because they cannot get overall points in this chapter. Although that is good to relate the content of present chapter to the following chapter, but it is better to explain in brief what have discussed in present chapter before continuing to relate it to the following chapter.


DISCUSSION ON ARGUED POINTS

Thomas, in this chapter, states that people use indirectness because they want to regard for face or politeness. Nevertheless, he did not explain whose face he refers to clearly in this chapter. It is ambiguous, whether the face refers to whom-hearer, speaker, or both of them. However from the author’s explanation and examples in each points, the writers could get the point that the ‘face’ refers to hearer’s face. This could be seen in Thomas (1995, 122) who states that by employing indirectness people obtain some advantage or avoid some negative consequence, such as to avoid hurting someone else or appearing pushy. From this statement, it is clear that face in this case refers to hearer’s face. This indicates that one of motives of people employing indirectness is only to keep hearer’s face or being polite to others.

However, Zhang and You (2009) propose that the motivation of people do indirectness because they do not only want to save receiver’s face but also for self protection. Goffman (1959) state that face is a sacred thing for every human being, an essential factor communicators all have to pay attention to; face wants are reciprocal, i.e. if one wants his face cared for, he should care for other people’s face. So, it means that all the people try to protect the face of others, and at the same time save their own. In fact, whether one can save his face or not is in the control of others. If one does not want to lose his face, the safest way is not to damage the face of others. Therefore, the ultimate goal of not offending others is for self-protection. Indirectness is a way to show politeness to others and it is used in many speech acts, such as request, invitation, etc. in case the possible rejection or conflict occurs. For example:

Could you possibly lend me your bike this afternoon?

If one wants to borrow something from others, the conventional indirectness of a question form is usually used. The speaker is technically asking permission to make a request. By being indirect, the speaker is making it less obvious that he expects the hearer to comply. On the surface, at least, this provides greater freedom for the hearer to refuse. Even if the hearer refuses, he will use polite language so as not to cause embarrassment of the requester, such as “Sorry, I will use it this afternoon”. However, it is another case if the requester asks in a direct and usually rude manner, such as:

Lend me your bike this afternoon.

With the imperative form, the speaker actually issues an order. It sounds rather impolite, abrupt and even insolent. What is more, it may cause antipathy in the requestee towards to speaker. As a result, the requestee will not be friendly to the requester either by showing him an indifferent face, or just says: “No, I do not want to lend it to you.” On hearing this, the requester will certainly get embarrassed and feel his face lost. So, indirectness is very important for self-protection.

As the writers, we cannot state our position whether we tend to use Goffman or Thomas. It is because these theories are overlapping. They are interrelated each other.

Furthermore, the author considers that culture differences are also motivated people to use indirectness. The author use Goffman’s (1967) notion of free and non free good in discussing about the size of imposition. Goffman (1967) in Thomas (1995, 130) defined free goods as those which in a given situation, anyone can use without asking permission, i.e. salt in the restaurant. Requesting free goods (or free services, like asking someone time) requires a minimal degree of indirectness. However, there is an example given by David (2000) that time is not always refers to free goods. It could be seen from the conversation happened in Tokyo between Japanese teacher and American student.

Miki-sensei went on to explain how to ask for things.

1 S: “If you want, for example, to borrow some money, you ask the other person if he or she has any.” If you want to know the time, you ask if the other person has a watch.”

2 D: ”Why not just ask for the time?”

3 S: “Too much directness,” Miki-sensei said.

4 D: “But the time is free.”

5 S: “Maybe, but in Japan, not a good idea.

From this conversation, it could be seen that asking information about time cannot be uttered using a minimal degree of indirectness (5), although asking for time is free good (Goffman, 1967) in Thomas (1995). This is because Japanese, Chinese, Korean prefer the indirect style to mask their true wants and thoughts in order to being polite to others. This is in a line with Gudyskunt and Ting Toomey (2000) in Cheng (2003), people in individualistic, low context cultures such as European Americans, prefer a direct style and talk explicitly about their true intentions and desires. People in collectivistic, high context cultures, such as African Americans, Japanese and Chinese and Koreans prefer the indirect style and use ambiguous statements to mask their true wants and thoughts. Therefore, it could be said that free goods in a country could be non free goods or taboo topics in other country. So, in order to self-defense and save hearer’s face, it is better to employ indirectness.






CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATION



Conclusion

Indirectness is a kind of communicative style which is universally used by the people. It is often used as a means of determining politeness, to avoid embarrassment, to make the conversation runs smoothly, and to maintain a good, harmonious relationship among the participants. In the area of pragmatics, the discussion of indirectness including intentional indirectness, indirectness is costly and risky, the speakers are behaving in a rational manner and given the universality of indirectness, and for the purpose of this intentional indirectness people shall ignore the possibility that something cannot be expressed.

To measure the degree of indirectness of an utterance, people can use Wilson and Sperber approach, such as by looking at the role of context, believe, background knowledge, co-text, and goals of the indirectness. There are three motives for employing indirectness: the desire to be interesting, the desire to increase the force of one’s message, and the recognition that the speaker has two competing goals (generally the clash between the speaker’s propositional goal and his or her interpersonal goal).




REFERENCES



David,Sedaris.2000.Japanese indirectness.Retrieved on January,1st 2011 from www.google.com



Thomas,Jenny.1995.Meaning in Interaction: Introduction to Pragmatics.Longman Publishing,New York



Zhang and You.2009.Motives in Indirectness-Asian Perspective. Retrieved on December, 16th 2010 from www.ccsenet.org/journal.html



Winnie,Cheng.2003.Intercultural Conversation.John Benyamin Publishing Company.Retrieved on January,1st 2011 from http//:books.google.co.id/