Nepali requestive acts: Linguistic indirectness and politeness reconsidered

Anglo-American studies of speech acts have shown that linguistic indirectness is employed in order to achieve the conversational goal of politeness. Cross-linguistic studies on the other hand suggest a lack of definitive evidence for the link between linguistic indirectness and politeness. This article revisits the link between linguistic indirectness and politeness by examining requestive acts from naturally occurring conversational data in Nepali. The findings reported in this article show two important facts about language use in Nepali. First, language-specific linguistic means are employed in the communication of the social meaning of politeness in Nepali. Second, the selection of directives is motivated by those sociocultural factors that are uniquely relevant to Nepali society. Accordingly, a significant conclusion derived from this study is that politeness does not have to be a function of linguistic indirectness and that the putative link between linguistic indirectness and politeness remains inconclusive.