Indirectness: A Study of Non-observance of Manner Maxim in Females’ Speech

Abstract

Indirectness is taken as reporting the exact or approximate words of another with such changes as are necessary to bring the original statement into grammatical conformity with the sentence in which it is included. The idea of indirectness in conversational discourse has many facets to exercise the practicability of Gricean theory, as there is a popular belief that women's speech is more indirect than men's speech. However, there has been little empirical evidence to support this claim (Rundquist, 1992). Thus, this paper aims at exploring the relationship between gender and indirectness, focusing on one type of indirectness, what Grice (1975) refers to as flouting the maxims of conversation. Results of this study indicate that there is indirectness in women speech, as there is non-observance of the Gricean maxims, thus providing evidence supporting the theory of indirectness.