Ruytenbeek N. Indirect speech acts

Cambridge University Press, 2021. — 238 p.Language is much more than a simple code for exchanging information. It is first and foremost used to interact with one another through the performance of actions such as warning about a state of affairs (Your train is leaving in five minutes), asking a question (When does your train leave?), wishing someone good luck (Have a nice trip!), telling someone what to do (Show me your train ticket). These actions, which are accomplished by means of written or spoken utterances, are called ‘speech acts’ (SAs), following the tradition in linguistic pragmatics and the philosophy of language.
When speakers and writers want to communicate clearly, when the meaning they purport to convey is explicit and unambiguous, they use ‘direct’ SAs, a category of utterances characterized by an association between a type of sentence and a type of SA. For example, a direct statement typically takes the form of a declarative sentence (John is coming tomorrow), a direct question the form of an interrogative sentence (Is John coming tomorrow?) and a direct request the form of an imperative sentence (Come tomorrow, John!). In all these cases, the meaning that the speaker or writer gets across is obvious.
However, in some situations, direct SAs are inappropriate, and, in using them, we face the risk of hurting our interlocutors and being considered impolite. This is where indirect SAs (for short, ISAs) come into play. They are considered ‘indirect’ in the sense that they are not the most straightforward way to perform a given SA, and they have different interpretations, depending on the contexts in which they take place.