Indirect Speech In 'The Mountain Shadow'

People use politeness to seem nice, modest and tactful. It is one of the most important factor of living in a society. Our self- image showing to others is called by linguists a face, it should be recognised and respected in a society, it is the picture of ourselves which we want to reveal to others.
If we talk to the other person in a rude or not appropriate way, we perform a face- threatening act, e.g. saying ‘Give me that’ is seen as inappropriate unless the speaker’s social power is greater than hearer’s (like in the army). Using indirect question in this situation removes the assumption of social power ‘Can you give me that’? or even ‘Could you pass me that’? Such utterances are seen as face- saving acts. If we perform face- saving acts we respect

, Latham- Koening C (2003) New English File: Intermediate Student 's Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. Text analyse.
In this part of the paper the author presents dialogspresents dialogs from the book and tries to investigate if there are any speech acts and, if they occur, whether they are direct or indirect. She also wants to check in what purpose indirect speech acts have been used. Dialogs are taken from
The Mountain Shadow, written by Gregory David Roberts. Dialog 1:
‘Lin!’ he said, shaking my hand as if he was pumping water from a village well. ‘My name is Farzad. Come on in!’ (…) ‘They put me here… about two weeks ago,’ Farzad said, nodding toward his desk. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘That depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘On who the hell you are, and what the hell you’re doin’ in my office.’
‘Oh,’ he laughed, relaxing enough to take a seat at the new desk. ‘That’s easy. I’m your new assistant. Count on it!’
‘I didn’t ask for a new assistant. I liked the old assistant.’
‘But I thought you didn’t have an assistant?’
‘Exactly.’
A reader can see, that the scene describes a meeting of two strangers who are to work together. Among their utterances, the author managed to find a few speech