Indirectness in communication

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The article entitled ‘’Why we don’t say what we mean: a study of verbal indirection in communication” by Jamaliah Mohd Ali is aimed at demonstrating how people encode and decode linguistic images in ways that suits them and this may vary between individuals which may lead to some misunderstandings during everyday interaction (p.1). The writer is of the opinion that this journal is only intended to Malay workers, businessmen or entrepreneurs as the researcher is focusing more on them in her study. This article is conceptual because the researcher’s arguments are based on logical and persuasive reasoning.

This article is basically discussed on the communicative strategies in which indirectness plays a major role to maintain the face and politeness which causes misunderstandings amongst speakers. Western societies tend to associate indirectness with dishonesty and directness as honesty (p. 4), meanwhile Malay culture considers indirectness as a very important aspect to avoid crisis among speakers. Therefore, she has come out with some solutions to avoid miscommunication especially in business setting. For example, the workers have to be taught to express their feelings about working conditions to their superiors in a clear manner. This solution is appropriate as the researcher has mentioned earlier that the reluctance of the Malay workers to directly voice their discontent to the management as to show their respect (p. 6).

This research is built on theories and frameworks in the study that was conducted by Brown and Levinson (1978). The theoretical framework is explicitly designed to explain the role of indirectness in polite behaviour. According to Brown and Levinson, indirectness is used for several reasons including to avoid from invading someone’s territory, for example by embarrassing him or her (Bruti, 2006). Jamaliah makes use of the theory to carry out the research in Malay culture to test the validity of the politeness theory.

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The writer manages to find one research that was based on the same theoretical framework like Jamaliah did. For example, the research done by Félix-Brasdefer (2005), entitled “Indirectness and politeness in Mexican requests” also investigates the notions of indirectness and politeness in the speech act of requests among native speakers of Mexican Spanish in formal and informal situations. However, this research is more convincing as the researcher used empirical evidence to support his arguments.

This article was written a few years back. The researcher might present her point of view based on the current situation at that time where ...

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