Off-record indirectness and the notion of imposition

What is it about?

Off-record utterances are polite ways of requesting, but encode their politeness in situationally and culturally specific ways. Since off-record devices have more than one plausible interpretation, they have been largely seen as devices deriving their politeness force from minimising impositions by leaving the addressee more freedom as to how to interpret them while also enabling the speaker to avoid responsibility for having committed a particular act, if s/he so wishes. This paper presents some preliminary observations and findings which associate off-record requests with offers in familial and familiar contexts in Greek. It is, thus, argued that another equally strong motivation for their employment is the opportunity they provide the addressee to offer instead of being requested. Bearing in mind the different orientations of the Greeks and the English regarding the variable importance attached to the notions of involvement and independence, it appears that the motivation for offering (without being requested) is stronger than that of non-imposition in Greek, while the latter appears to be stronger in English.

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