Graduation Semester and Year
Fall 2025
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Laurel Stvan
Second Advisor
Brian Horton
Third Advisor
Joseph Sabbagh
Abstract
Directives are divided into three types, corresponding to different levels of explicitness. To get a hearer who has left the front door open on a cold winter night while taking off their shoes, one can use a direct directive (e.g., Close the door!), a conventionalised indirect directive (e.g., Can you close the door?), or a non-conventionalised indirect directive (e.g., It’s –15 outside.). Inherently implicit in nature, non-conventionalised indirect directives (NCIDs) have been understudied due to being the most context-dependent and form-independent type of directives, which underscores the central role of context-based inferencing and contextual salience in processing and studying them. To determine the linguistic and social parameters that decide the contextual appropriacy of NCIDs, this research used an online questionnaire to elicit the linguistic intuition and judgments of ten native speakers of English regarding the linguistic and sociopragmatic properties of a set of naturally occurring real-life NCIDs manually collected from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE). Examined as linguistic variables were A) the referent on whom/which the request was pinned, B) the degree of structural explicitness, and C) the degree of certainty conveyed through the utterance through hedging or lack thereof. As socio-contextual variables, I examined A) the social distance between the requester and the requestee, B) the social power balance between them, C) the type of requested action, and D) the degree of imposition placed on the requestee. Additionally, to evaluate it as a potential basis for a uniform classification of NCIDs, I also examined the strategy deployed in performing the sample NCIDs. The results showed significant preference for specific strategies, referent types, degrees of explicitness and certainty, and types of request action over others. Social distance and power balance were not found to play a significant role in deciding the linguistic variables of NCID utterances. Of the interaction between the examined socio-contextual factors and linguistic variables, only the relation between the type of requested action and the degree of certainty was found to be significant, in that the degree of certainty presented in the utterances of NCIDs demanding an immediate action or stoppage was lower than those demanding a delayed action.
Keywords
Speech Act Theory, non-conventionalised indirect directives, corpus pragmatics, sociopragmatics, Politeness Theory, social distance, social power
Disciplines
Semantics and Pragmatics
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Mohammadpanah, Hammed, "Indirect Requests: Sociopragmatic Aspects of Non-Conventionalised Indirect Directives" (2025). Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations. 122.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/linguistics_tesol_dissertations/122