Make no bones about it. A study of the use of indirectness in invitations and proposals through WhatsApp

Abstract

In this article we propose to analyze interactions taken from different groups of WhatsApp to account for the different discursive strategies used by the participants to make invitations or proposals, using the resources that make up the paradigm of options of this medium. We argue that indirectness can be analyzed as a feature that is present in all the discourse strategies that participants use in a conversation with a specific interactional purpose. That is, in any discursive strategy analyzed in the context of an interaction it is possible to recognize some degree of indirectness. The methodology we apply is interpretative and of qualitative analysis of the data. We will characterize the strategies with the purpose of establishing recurrences and correlating the different realizations with two interactional factors: the preservation of the own face and the reaffirmation of the relationship with the other participants. From the results obtained, we conclude that, although both factors are always present, a greater degree of indirectness of the strategy used increases the purpose of reaffirming the relationship at the expense of the protection of one’s face.

Keywords: interaction, multimodality, pragmatics.