Abstract

Indirect speech is a universal phenomenon of human language communication. Out of courtesy or some other social conventions, people convey their intentions not always in a straightforward manner, but often by implication, expressing subtle implication politely. Thus, the proper interpretation and understanding of indirect speech is vital to our success of communication. This paper reviews the predecessors’ interpretation from the Anglo-American tradition of pragmatic theory, relevance theory, adaptation theory to other linguistic perspectives with a brief comment on those dimensions, and at the same time, it tries to explore a comprehensive interpretation approach to indirect speech, in order to enrich the mechanism of indirect speech interpretation, and help with successful communication.

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