Indirect Li-Questions in the Bulgarian Language

Marina Dzhonova
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”

Abstract

The article treats the cases in spoken Bulgarian language where the speaker uses the yes/no questions as indirect directives. In terms of Brown and Levinson (1990) those speech acts are an off record politeness strategy. The pragmatic factors that determine
the use of these indirect speech acts are discussed. Conclusions are based on data from the Corpus of spoken Bulgarian and the Corpus of Bulgarian political and journalistic speech.

Keywords: politeness, indirect speech acts, pragmatics