Politeness and indirectness revisited

Abstract

This article describes a study undertaken to investigate whether the notions of politeness and indirectness are considered related in requests formulated by native and non-native speakers. The request data were collected from two groups of speakers, namely: 100 Luganda and 100 Luganda English university students. For data collection, a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaire was designed to elicit from the respondents a speech act response in the form of a request. Using the nine point directness and politeness scales adopted from Blum-Kulka's 1987 study, respondents were asked to rate the responses from the DCTs in terms of directness and politeness. Results indicated that indirectness does not necessarily communicate politeness in Luganda. These findings are in line with Blum-Kulka's (1987) claim that in contrast to the contemporary theories of politeness, indirectness as perceived by Hebrew speakers does not indicate politeness.