Thanks for passing along the find, Jim. The account of the sexual assault case was very telling, and something that may be useful for our school in articulating student life strategies for sexual conduct policies.

Part of the discussion seemed to touch on speech act theory, in how a statement could function as a request ("there are groceries in the car" was one of the examples). The problem of male 'incomprehension' of indirect speech is not one of understanding but one of willful resistance -- a pretext, in other words. I've been working on how to relate illocutionary force to ethos, in the sense of how understanding something as a request (its illocutionary force) engages a presumption of a particular kind of relationship between people of a particular character (ethos as character). I want to link illocution with ethos to put illocution's analytic dimension of intention into motion with rhetoric's attention to communicative contexts and audiences.

Paul