What question did this study set out to answer?

This article aims to explore the functions of indirectness in communication and propose a typology for better understanding its role in interaction.

June 6, 2026

Indirectness as a conversational resource: Involvement, Autonomy, Control, and Frame in relational and institutional interaction

Key Points

This article aims to explore the functions of indirectness in communication and propose a typology for better understanding its role in interaction.
Analyzed service-call dialogues and relational chat data from the DiaBiz corpus.
Developed a typology of Indirectness focusing on Involvement, Autonomy, Control, and Frame.
Operationalized each Face of indirectness through various diagnostic dimensions.
Identified how indirectness helps manage interpersonal alignment and rights in communication.
Demonstrated distinct interactional functions of indirectness across relational and institutional contexts.
Proposed a framework linking interactional function with observable cues in dialogue.

Abstract

Abstract Indirectness is a pervasive feature of everyday interaction, yet its functions remain fragmented across theoretical traditions. While inferential pragmatics has largely treated indirectness as a deviation from direct expression motivated by politeness or mitigation, interactional and indexical approaches emphasise how meaning emerges through contextualisation cues, framing, and uptake in real-time interaction. This article proposes a compact analytic typology of Faces of indirectness – Involvement, Autonomy, Control, and Frame – defined not by linguistic form but by the interactional problems indirectness helps manage. Each Face is operationalised through a set of diagnostic dimensions: interactional action, cue constellation, designed gap, and uptake signature. Using illustrative extracts from the DiaBiz (Pęzik, P., G. Krawentek, S. Karasińska, P. Wilk, P. Rybińska, A. Cichosz, A. Peljak-Łapińska, M. Deckert & M. Adamczyk. 2022. DiaBiz – An annotated corpus of Polish call center dialogs. In Proceedings of the 13th conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2022) , 723–726. European Language Resources Association) corpus of service-call dialogues together with private anonymised relational chat fragments, the study demonstrates how these Faces become recognisable in sequential interaction. The analysis shows that indirectness functions as a resource for managing alignment, rights, procedural trajectories, and interpretive context across both relational and institutional settings. The proposed framework offers a method-oriented approach to analysing indirectness that links interactional function with observable cues and uptake trajectories.

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