Directness and indirectness across cultures questions the basic assumptions of Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson's (1978, 1987) theoretical framework for the study and interpretation of directness, indirectness, politeness, impoliteness, and their relationship. This framework was based primarily on the expression of politeness phenomena within the English elite and does not, therefore, hold when exploring other cultures or English speakers from different communities. By presenting and analyzing data from different cultures under a ‘discursive approach to politeness’ (4), this book aims to reconsider the simplistic and ethnocentric assumptions made by the previous theoretical framework and seeks to ‘develop a more complex view of the relationship between language, culture, politeness, directness and indirectness’ (4).
Chapter 1 introduces problematic aspects of Brown & Levinson's (1978, 1987) approach, revealing that ‘indirectness is not an agreed-upon term in all languages’ (7). To address this, the authors set about analyzing politeness using a ‘discursive theoretical approach’. In doing so they stress the importance of variability in the linguistic ideologies of societies and the evaluations of interactants within the context of the interaction.
Chapters 2 and 3 are concerned with the theoretical perspectives on the two main concepts of the book: directness and indirectness. Chapter 2 includes an explanation of how indirectness is understood in relation to literal and intended meaning, conventional politeness, and on- versus off-record speech acts, all whilst offering a more comprehensive description in response to the ambiguous views of the previous approach when applied to other cultures. Chapter 3 deals with the evaluation of directness. The authors provide examples from Hebrew, Arabic, African languages, Polish, and German that evaluate directness positively, and also expand on the negative evaluations of directness through the exploration of social factors such as class, age, gender, and ethnicity.
Chapters 4 to 6 focus on the definition and evaluation of indirectness across cultures, ranging from communities of practice to the language group as a whole. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of naturally occurring conversations between one of the authors and both British and Zimbabwean interactants. The main focus is on the potential ‘miscommunication between cultures’ that can occur due to variability in the interpretation of indirectness (74). Chapter 5 presents directness and indirectness strategies observed during role-plays performed by monolingual British English speakers. The authors analyze ‘different cultural perspectives’ by showing the role-plays to bilingual participants from various countries. In chapter 6, follow-up interviews with the participants are discussed. These interviews investigated interpretations of the role-plays and the strategies that they themselves would use in their first languages. Chapter 7 presents the authors’ conclusions and discusses their main findings regarding directness and indirectness in light of linguistic ideologies and interactants’ evaluations.
This book provides a deeper analysis of the existence of ‘variability within cultures’ (4) than has been available previously. It adds both to the understanding of politeness and its relationship with directness and indirectness, such that each ‘linguistic community decides what they see as sophisticated’ and which politeness strategies they interpret as polite or impolite (3).
