Sequential and linguistic-phonetic design of indirectness in talk-in-interaction

理解语言结构和意义之间的关系的一个问题是间接性；这就是说话者如何能够表达出比他们所说的话更多的东西(或更多)。在各种形式的互动中，从非正式对话到更正式的工作场所和机构互动，演讲者在表达自己方面通常都是间接的。说话人不是直接说出他们想说的话，也不是直接回答/回应，而是选择暗示或暗示某事，让接受者来解释他们的意思。这项研究将调查自然对话，以发现说话者如何使用语音特征和谈话中话轮的顺序组织来实现间接。我们还将调查对话者如何对这些语音和顺序特征做出反应。通过这样做，我们的分析以参与日常对话的普通人的行为为坚实基础。这与当代许多关于间接性的研究形成了鲜明的对比，后者侧重于句法方面的研究，严重依赖于从任何经验的、互动的语境中抽象出来的具有结构语境的虚构句子。我们将考察对话中经常出现的两种环境下的间接性：(I)回答询问的叙述和(Ii)不一致的语序。就个人而言，这些环境允许我们提供间接的语言-语音设计的详细说明，并分析这样的话语是如何被交际者解释的。他们还将促进对产生和解释间接谈话的语言资源的比较分析。

One problem in understanding the relationship between language structure and meaning is indirectness; that is how speakers can mean something else (or something more) than their words appear to say. Speakers in all forms of interaction from informal conversation through more formal workplace and institutional interactions are commonly indirect in expressing themselves. Instead of saying directly what they wish to say or answering/responding directly, speakers may choose instead to allude to or imply something, leaving it to their recipients to interpret their meaning. The research will investigate natural conversation to discover how speakers use phonetic features and the sequential organisation of turns at talk to accomplish indirectness. We will also investigate how these phonetic and sequential features are reacted to by their interlocutors. By doing this we give our analysis a firm grounding in the behaviour of ordinary people engaged in everyday conversation. This contrasts with much contemporary work on indirectness which has focused of syntactic aspects and relied heavily on invented sentences with contructed contexts abstracted from any empirical, interactional context. We will investigate indirectness in two kinds of environment which occur frequently in conversation (i) accounts in response to inquiry and (ii) disagreement sequences. Individually these environments allow us to provide detailed specification of the linguistic-phonetic design of indirectness and to analyse how such utterances are interpreted by interactants. They will also facilitate comparative analysis of linguistic resources for producing and interpreting indirect talk.