6.4. ACKNOWLEDGING SOCIAL STATUS THROUGH SPEECH 319
not, effectively leaving the process of deciding whether it’s a good idea or
not entirely up to the listener:
A:
B:A: ”No maĴer how much I study I don’t seem to understand this.”
B: ”Hmm. Well, what about asking the teacher?”This is the most polite way of making a suggestion, because it only
stays at making the suggestion, without adding a personal recommenda-
tion to it, meaning you do not decide what the other person should do.
Pseudo-future suggesting and presuming
As you may remember from the section on the pseudo-future from the
”More Grammar” chapter, the pseudo-future can be used for three things,
namely the dubitative, cohortative and presumptive, and it turns out that
these last two are ideal for use in indirect speech, as they guess at the world
and leave the conclusions or decisions based on these guesses up to the
listener, instead of imposing your own opinions on them:
”Shall (we) go (out) for sushi today?”This question leaves the decision up to the listener, which is typ-
ically a polite thing to do, unless of course you’re dealing with someone
who cannot deal with making decisions, in which case using indirect speech
is arguably not a good idea in the first place.
”The reason this computer’s broken is (probably) because it’s old
(right?).”In this sentence, the speaker assumes that the computer in question
is old, and leaves the maĴer of whether this assumption is correct up to the
listener to decide, thus not providing potential disinformation to the lis-
tener. Of course, this is an over-analysis, and these forms aren’t actually so
much used to prevent disinformation as just used because indirect speech
is polite, and that’s what you use. However, the analysis does hold up to
scrutiny for a good reason: not presuming to know beĴer means you’re
never forcing anyone into anything, which makes you quite civilised.