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Abstract

When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence.

@article{pinker08logicOfIndirectSpeechPNAS,
  author={Steven Pinker and Martin A. Nowak and James J. Lee},
  title={The logic of indirect speech},
  journal={PNAS},
  year={2008},
  month={January},
  volume={105},
  number={3},
  pages={833-838},
  doi={10.1073/pnas.0707192105},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/pinker08logicOfIndirectSpeechPNAS.html}
}

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