INDIRECTNESS IN INTERACTION

I generally work in a method usually called discourse or interactional analysis (I also do variation analysis). In several conversations in my data I noted some kinds of indirectness which was different from the way this phonomenon is usually portrayed in linguistic pragmatics. Mainly I was noticing that there was more to indirection than doing a different speech act than is canonically encoded by an utterance. I noticed that I wasn't the only one doing such analyses and organized a session at a conference and then a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics.