| dc.description.abstract | Indirect communication patterns are often a means to save the interlocutor’s face:
avoiding open refusals is a clear example of that. The Shona of Zimbabwe, like other
African peoples, sometimes avoid direct responses to favour-expressing speech acts in
view of the dangers such responses pose to the participants’ ‘face’ as well as to social and
interpersonal harmony. The reluctance to say ‘no’ may take a number of forms. This
article focuses on the way Shona speakers communicate refusals through indirect
communication styles. Indirect styles refer to strategies that camouflage and conceal
speakers’ true intentions in terms of their wants, needs, goals and attitudes in the
discourse situation. The investigation has two aims. First, this is an exploration of the
strategies and the relationship of the strategies and two factors: the type of favourexpressing
speech acts, which include requests and invitations; and the closeness, social
status, age, and gender of the interlocutors. Secondly, this is an analysis of the role of
positive politeness in determining the interlocutors’ preference for indirectness. We use
an Afrocentric version of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory to explicate the
motivation for preferring indirect strategies. Data are collected using the Discourse
Completion Test (DCT), follow-up interviews, group discussions and observation. The
questionnaires were answered by thirty adult male and female Shona speakers drawn
from randomly selected University of Zimbabwe undergraduate students and employees. | en |
