Metapragmatic Research On Intentional Indirect Use Of Language

Indirect use of language is a familiar but special pragmatic phenomenon. In the perspective of metapragmatics, language is chosen under the speaker's reflexive awareness of his communicative purposes and strategies. From this perspective, this study is primarily concerned with the linguistic strategies applied in the intentional indirect use of language: the speaker intentionally conveys something in saying something different. In case of the potential communicative failure, the speaker makes efforts to design his indirect expression recognizable and understandable. Meanwhile the double communicative role makes it possible for the speaker to strategically design his utterance in accordance with the hearer's situation. The speaker intentionally and consciously designs his utterance to trigger his hearer firstly to recognize his indirect expression and secondly to find out the implicature behind it. The strategies used for indirectness recognition are generalized in terms of false expressing, uninformative expressing, expressing in unusual manner, and setting language activity. To design the utterance understandable, the speaker consciously triggers his hearer with the utterance to activate or choose the less accessible context. This mechanism is reified as the strategies exploiting the phonetic, formal and semantic characteristics of the language. Both of the two categories represent the speaker's metapragmatic awareness of the speaking purpose and the devices to fulfill it. Finally, the paper makes some implication for the further research in indirect use of language.