Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 27, Issue 3, March 1997, Pages 361-386
Journal of Pragmatics

Indirectness in L1 and L2 academic writing

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(96)00040-9 Get rights and content

Abstract

Indirectness strategies and markers have been identified in written discourse in many languages, including English. However, in Anglo-American academic writing, explicit points and direct support are expected. In the view of specialists and ESL instructors alike, indirectness seems to characterize the writing of students raised in Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist societies. The reasons that non-native speaker (NNS) second language writing appears vague and indirect may lie in the specific and contextual uses of indirectness devices in English writing rather than in the fact that they are used. This study, based on corpus analysis, compares specific indirectness devices employed in native speaker (NS) and NNS student essays and focuses on NS and NNS uses of twenty-one rhetorical, lexical, referential (deictic), and syntactic indirectness devices. The results of the study indicate that speakers of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Indonesian utilized rhetorical questions and tags, disclaimers and denials, vagueness and ambiguity, repetition, several types of hedges, ambiguous pronouns, and the passive voice in greater frequencies than NSs did. However, NSs and NNSs did not differ significantly in their use of other types of indirectness devices and markers, such as point of view distancing, downtoners, diminutives, discourse particles, and understatements, as well as nominalization and conditional tenses.

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