Direct and Indirect Speech Acts in English

4. Life x 3

Reza introduces two married couples: Henri and Sonia and Hubert and Inès. Henri is not a very successful research scientist who has invited his superior, Hubert Finidori (with his wife, Inès), over for dinner the next night. But suddenly the Finidori’s show up - a day early.⁴ The hostess is completely unprepared to receive guests, which creates many absurd situations troughout the whole play . The play has three acts; in each the central embarrassing situation is replayed with slight changes. I have chosen the first act (I will further use the word play instead of act) to deal with in my work as I find it most interesting from the point of view of indirectness.

The play contains four types of exchanges: direct speech acts motivated by direct speech acts, indirect speech acts motivated by direct speech acts, direct speech acts motivated by indirect speech acts and finally indirect speech acts motivated by indirect speech acts.

The proportion of individual types in the play is outlined in the following table:

There is a variety of reasons for the use of universal indirectness and hence also for indirectness in this piece of theatre. Thomas (1995) introduces the main factors which influence the application of indirect speech acts in the discourse; she claims that the motivation for indirectness includes:

• 
  The desire to make one’s language more/less interesting
  
• 
  To increase the force of one’s message
  
• 
  Competing goals
  
• 
  Politeness (Thomas, 1995: 143)
  

These four observations can be traced in the indirect utterances of Reza’s play, too. However, in large measure, it is not only the purpose but also the context, the shared background situation (Searle, 1979: 48), the speaker-hearer relationship, their education and social status which determine whether the characters, and people in general, choose to use indirect speech acts or not.

“Conversational situations are never just conversational. They are governed by social rules as well as conversational rules. Insofar as these are mutually recognized – whether institutionally imposed, determined by the persons involved, or personally imposed and reflective of the individuals involved – they provide guidelines within which acts (linguistic and otherwise) are performed and perceived.” (Bach and Harnish, 1979: 105)

4.1. Direct speech Acts As a Reaction to Direct Speech Acts

There are only 27 direct - direct exchanges in the play. Their role is more or less informative and sober. To a direct question there is a direct answer. The cooperative principle together with at least three Grice’s maxims, those of Quality, Relation and Manner, is always observed and thus there is little space for any possible misunderstanding.

Henri: Should I peel it?

Sonia: Yes. (18)
Henri: Have you closed the doors?

Sonia: Yes. (33)

Henri: You didn’t go to see him?

Sonia: No. (28)

Hubert: Yes, yes, this morning: ‘On the Flatness of Galaxy Halos’. (23)

In the first three utterances above, the speaker forms a direct question with one intention – to get a satisfactory and unequivocal answer. The hearer understands what information the speaker is asking for and forms an adequate response. As for yes/no question, it is of course either a clear yes or a clear no. The four maxims are fully observed. The question and also the answer are both perfectly clear.

Yet, the fourth exchange is a bit different from the preceding two. The speaker utters a direct yes/no question but the hearer apart from answering mere yes adds another piece of information (this morning and the name of an article On the Flatness of Galaxy Halos). The hearer provides perhaps more information than was originally needed and asked for and he thus violates Grice’s maxim of Quantity. In the context of the play, the hearer is a cunning intellectual who wants to discourage and humiliate his colleague and I suppose that is why he quickly adds other unsolicited facts. Hubert possibly also tries to make his utterance more interesting and a bare yes to a yes/no question would thus not be enough to fulfill this role.

Wh-questions are, in this case, very similar to yes/no questions: A direct question is formed in order to get a specific answer (information) different from yes or no.

Inès: How old is he?

Sonia. Six. (34)

Sonia: Montparnasse. (24)

Sonia: The Fox and the Hound. You put the Fox and the Hound on for him. (39)

The direct-direct exchanges are quite brief, with no implicature involved, with no additional level of meaning. The hearer does not have to look for what the speaker might have meant by uttering such and such sentence, everything in their interaction is expressed explicitly. Misunderstandings hardly occur.