Linguistics: Pragmatics

Meaning in Context: Signed Language Users Are Both Direct and Indirect

Signed language research, especially research on American Sign Language (ASL) by Daniel Roush and Jack Hoza, contradicts a long-standing assumption that Deaf people are direct and hearing people are indirect. Although research indicates that there may be overall tendencies for signed language communities to be more direct and spoken language communities to be more indirect due to differing cultural values and norms, in actual face-to-face communication, members of both communities alternate between being direct and indirect, often within the same interaction.

For both signed language users and spoken language users, speaker meaning can differ from sentence meaning in one of two ways, which represent the two main fields of study in pragmatics. First, information conveyed by an utterance may be the same or different from what is actually stated, in that the speaker may intend the content to be taken either literally or nonliterally. For example, consider the difference between the English utterances “She is tall” (literal) and “She is a ball of fire” (nonliteral, meaning “She is a go-getter”). Second, the function of an utterance—to ask, to command, to reject—may be direct and intended as stated, or it may be indirect, requiring the addressee to infer the true function. For example, a question may be used to ask for information, as in “What time is the meeting?” (direct) or to give a command or make a statement, as in “Why are you just standing there?” (an indirect command: “Move!”) and “Why do I listen to him?” (an indirect statement: “I shouldn’t listen to him”). Addressees usually assume that speakers are being both literal and direct unless the speaker signals a different intended meaning or intent, as explained further below.

First, it is important to understand that people use language to achieve actions. So, for example, instead of shoving someone out of the way, an ASL signer may sign something like “MOVE-OVER! I COME-THROUGH!” [translation: Move over! I’m coming through!], which is both literal and direct. (Note that the glossing is an approximation of the ASL signs and hyphenated words such as MOVE-OVER represent one sign.) Different utterances [Page 635]can accomplish the same speech act. For instance, “EXCUSE ME” [Excuse me] or “DON’T-MIND MOVE-OVER?” [Do you mind moving over?] could achieve the same speech act (to get the addressee to move aside), but are more indirect, and each of the three options here may be considered more or less polite depending on the circumstances.

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