Indirectness as a conversational resource: Involvement, Autonomy, Control, and Frame in relational and institutional interaction

Abstract Indirectness is a pervasive feature of everyday interaction, yet its functions remain fragmented across theoretical traditions. While inferential pragmatics has largely treated indirectness as a deviation from direct expression motivated by politeness or mitigation, interactional and indexical approaches emphasise how meaning emerges through contextualisation cues, framing, and uptake in real-time interaction. This article proposes a compact analytic typology of Faces of indirectness – Involvement, Autonomy, Control, and Frame – defined not by linguistic form but by the interactional problems indirectness helps manage. Each Face is operationalised through a set of diagnostic dimensions: interactional action, cue constellation, designed gap, and uptake signature. Using illustrative extracts from the DiaBiz (Pęzik, P., G. Krawentek, S. Karasińska, P. Wilk, P. Rybińska, A. Cichosz, A. Peljak-Łapińska, M. Deckert & M. Adamczyk. 2022. DiaBiz – An annotated corpus of Polish call center dialogs. In Proceedings of the 13th conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2022) , 723–726. European Language Resources Association) corpus of service-call dialogues together with private anonymised relational chat fragments, the study demonstrates how these Faces become recognisable in sequential interaction. The analysis shows that indirectness functions as a resource for managing alignment, rights, procedural trajectories, and interpretive context across both relational and institutional settings. The proposed framework offers a method-oriented approach to analysing indirectness that links interactional function with observable cues and uptake trajectories.