Despite the fact that communication in a research setting is highly constrained, participants tacitly assume that researchers will follow the cooperative principle and be informative, truthful, clear, and relevant. Even when experimenters are explicitly uncooperative, participants draw on the context to make inferences and to understand the meaning of the experimenters' utterances. Face is the public display of the self, whereas face-work refers to communications apt to create, support, or challenge face. Hence indirectness is conceived as a sensitive action performed in a nonthreatening manner. But indirect requests involve violations of the Gricean maxims.
Politeness is related to the interpersonal dimensions of power and distance.
The greater the addressee's power or psychological distance is, the more polite the request, and vice versa. Furthermore nonpreferred responses are delayed with respect to the typical adjacency pairs in conversation, or are implicit or syntactically complex. The second part of the chapter analyses the comprehension of indirect speech acts. The author claims that recognition of the speaker's meaning depends on the social context or could be due also to individual and cultural differences. Studies have shown that the literal meaning of indirect remarks is not always activated and the understanding of metaphors and idioms does not rely on the literal meaning.