"I'm dry" meaning "Would you buy me a drink?" What semantic or rhetorical term describes such usage?

Question

Instead of saying "Could I have some water, please?" a visitor says "I am thirsty". The host understands it perfectly and says "Let me get you something to drink. What would you like?" or at a diner, the beautiful blond says "I'm dry" and her date immediately calls the waitress. There are lots of situations when we say something and mean something else but the listener understands perfectly what we mean. No ambiguity as in the examples below, where an answer would be considered a joke. What kind of term describes that?

e.g.

P1 "Can you pass the salt?" P2 "Yes, of course I can."

P1 "Have you got a pen?" P2 "Yes, I do."

Edit - For clarity - A whole sentence (not a word or phrase) means something but we mean something else, and listener understands what we mean.

Answer 1

It's an example of...

circumlocution - also called circumduction, circumvolution, periphrasis, or ambage
- an ambiguous or roundabout figure of speech

All those alternatives are "wordy" words. In common speech we're more likely to call it...

beating around/about the bush
- if you beat around the bush, or beat about the bush, you don't say something directly

So "I'm thirsty!" may just be a (slightly) roundabout way of saying "Give/Buy me a drink!". That kind of "oblique meaning" will be obvious to all native speakers, but some are idiomatic usages that simply have to be learned. So a man saying "I have to see a man about a dog" (or a woman saying "I have to powder my nose") often means exactly and only "I'm going to the toilet to urinate".

Answer 2

I'd use the word hint for this type of speech.

When someone says "I am thirsty," hoping it will be understood as "Please give me a drink," I would say they are hinting that they would like a drink.

Merriam-Webster defines hint (as a verb) as "to convey indirectly and by allusion rather than explicitly," and offers as synonyms allude, imply, indicate, infer, insinuate, intimate and suggest.

(Infer doesn't seem appropriate to me, however. She implied that she would like a drink correctly describes the above situation, but She inferred that she would like a drink is definitely not correct. Note also that intimate should be understood to be used in its verb form, not as the more common adjective.)

Answer 3

Unfortunately I could not find the graph either in english nor in german that I was looking for.

At school we learned, that there are different layers of semantics and we had a nice graph with a rectangle and arrows. Well, I can't find it, so forget about that. The thing I remember is that our teacher came into the classroom that day saying "Oh, it is a little cold in here.". Someone got up and closed the window. He smiled, telling us he just introduced todays topic.

"It is cold in here." does of course mean that he feels cold. But, in relation to the fact that the window is open, it also codes for his wish to have that closed. A lot of people in the room intuitively inferred that meaning. In german he called those different levels or layers of semantics. Unfortunately, semantic layers in english is not necessarily related to language and I don"t know what it would be scientifically called.

In the picture we had speaker, recipient, context and message, I think. Whithout context, the recipient can only decode the literal meaning of the message, but with context he can also receive the additional hidden sub-message.

This, of course does not answer your question by giving you the correct name, but maybe someone knows the name for this.

Answer 4

This kind of analysis, beyond the literal semantics of an utterance to its contextual implications, is called the linguistic study of:

pragmatics

This usually involves going well beyond the literal denotation of words in syntax to their cognitive and social context. An implication, like saying "Do you know what time it is?" to really mean "Please tell me the time" is called an

implicature,

something that is communicated even though it is explicitly expressed. Often this is the effect of non-literal figures of speech like metonymy or metaphor.

Answer 5

Metonymy

is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its own name but rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept.
For instance, "Wall Street" is often used metonymously to describe the U.S. financial and corporate sector, while "Hollywood" is used as a metonym for the U.S. film industry

_{source: Wikipedia}

Other example than your dry/thirsty:

He penned a letter

Answer 6

If “What kind of term describes that?” is a question about how to understand indirect speech acts, one may find the following wikipedia articles of use:
• Performativity, “...an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and gestures to act or consummate an action...”
• Performative utterance, “The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action...”
• Performative text, “In the philosophy of language, the notion of performance conceptualizes what a spoken or written text can bring about in human interactions.”

Those articles, and others they link to, describe numerous linguistic theories about speech acts that do things (or cause them to be done). The Causative article may also be of interest, even if it doesn't give a concise answer to the question.

Answer 7

I would say an allusion, from the Latin verb ludere, lusus est "to play with"

Etymology
From Latin allūsiōnem, accusative singular of allūsiō (“the act of playing with”),
from allūdō (“play with; allude”),
from al-, combining form of ad (“to”), + lūdō (“play”): compare French allusion.

Noun; allusion (plural allusions)

An indirect reference; a hint; a reference to something supposed to be known,
but not explicitly mentioned; a covert indication.

So, in my opinion the visitor is alluding to wanting a drink in a playful manner.