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Karen Grainger & Sara Mills , Directness and indirectness across cultures . Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2016. Pp. ix, 177. Hb. £47.99.
Book Notes
Directness and indirectness across cultures questions the basic assumptions of Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson's (1978, 1987) theoretical framework for the study and interpretation of directness, indirectness, politeness, impoliteness, and their relationship. This framework was based primarily on the expression of politeness phenomena within the English elite and does not, therefore, hold when exploring other cultures or English speakers from different communities. By presenting and analyzing data from different cultures under a 'discursive approach to politeness' (4), this book aims to reconsider the simplistic and ethnocentric assumptions made by the previous theoretical framework and seeks to 'develop a more complex view of the relationship between...