間接的発話行為における丁寧性の再考察

概要

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Linguistic politeness in English language has already been studied for a few decades. In those studies, an indirect speech act, or an indirect way of speaking, has been considered to be the one and only communicative tool for indicating politeness to one's interlocutor. The author, however, has doubts about such an account of politeness. First of all, research methods utilized by celebrated politeness researchers had defects for finding the causal relationship between indirectness and politeness. In their experiments, a pragmatic meaning of an indirect speech act was not indirect at all. During the experiments, the informants of their studies might have known that indirect meaning, which in real communication, is always veiled with literal meaning. Secondly, those researchers focused on politeness degrees according to indirectness degrees, whose diversity is reflected in the variety of sentence forms, and thus, forgot to examine the propositional content of utterance. In other words, they concentrated so much energy on how to speak politely that they could not study what to say to be polite. Moreover, the author is of the opinion that indirectness does not necessarily indicate politeness in many situations. It is merely one part of politeness phenomena in English speaking countries. Rather than indirectness, we need to find languages and sentence forms by which the speaker can make the hearer comfortable.
東海大学の論文
2005-03-31