The present chapter examines the phenomenon of indirect ritual offence, which includes cases of recurrent offences that are indirect and as such make it difficult for the targeted person to respond to them. Manifestations of indirect ritual offence include a series of indirect attacks that recurrently target a person, and cases in which the targeted person is recurrently ostracised. While this behaviour has received significant attention is social psychology, it has not been studied in pragmatics and (im)politeness research, in spite of the fact that it is one of the most widely discussed forms of impoliteness behaviour in public discourses. The examination of this phenomenon also contributes to the pragmatic examination of the difference between indirectness and implicitness; as I point out in this chapter, indirect ritual offence becomes implicit from both academic and lay points of view if the frequency of such attacks decreases but the attacks nevertheless continue. In such cases, the targeted person may reinterpret previous attacks as “harmless” and speculate about the nature of new attacks, and even more importantly the abuser can easily claim that they have not intended to offend the other at all – thus, in such cases indirect ritual offence gains an implicit nature. In order to illustrate this point, I examine ways in which “implicit” as an evaluator tends to be metapragmatically used in accounts on indirect ritual offence.
Bloch, Sidney, Sally Browning, and Graham McGrath. 2011. “Humour in Group Psychotherapy.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 56: 89–97.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1987. “Indirectness and Politeness in Requests: Same or Different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11: 131–146.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Byon, Andrew Sangspil. 2006. “The Role of Linguistic Indirectness and Honorifics in Achieving Linguistic Politeness in Korean Requests.” Journal of Politeness Research 2: 247–276.
Carston, Robyn. 2009. “The Explicit/Implicit Distinction in Pragmatics and the Limits of Explicit Communication.” International Review of Pragmatics 1: 35–62.
Clift, Rebecca. 2012. “Identifying Action: Laughter in Non-humorous Reported Speech.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1303–1312.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Curtner-Smith, Mary E., Anne M. Culp, Rex Culp, Carrie Scheib, Kelly Owen, Angela Tilley, Molly Murphy, Lauren Parkman, and Peter W. Coleman. 2006. “Mothers’ Parenting and Young Economically Disadvantaged Children’s Relational and Overt Bullying.” Journal of Child and Family Studies 15: 177–189.
Drew, Paul, and Tracy Walker. 2009. “Going Too Far: Complaining, Escalating and Disaffiliation.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 2400–2414.
Dunham, Yarrow, Andrew Scott Barron, and Mahzarin R. Banaji. 2006. “From American City to Japanese Village: A Cross-cultural Investigation of Implicit Race Attitudes.” Child Development 77: 1268–1281.
Dynel, Marta. 2009. “Where Cooperation Meets Politeness: Revisiting Politeness Models in View of the Gricean Framework.” Brno Studies in English 35: 25–43.
Garandeau, Claire F., and Antonius H.N. Cilessen. 2006. “From Indirect Aggression to Invisible Aggression: A Conceptual View on Bullying and Peer Group Manipulation.” Aggression and Violent Behaviour 11: 612–625.
Gennep, van, Arnold. 1909 [1960]. Rite de Passage [The rites of passage]. New York and London: Routledge.
Glasø, Lars, Stig Berge Matthiesen, Morten Birkeland Neilsen, and Ståle Einarksen. 2007. “Do Targets of Workplace Bullying Portray a General Victim Personality Profile?” Scandinavian Journal of Social Psychology 48: 313–319.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1986. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Grainger, Karen. 2011. “Indirectness in Zimbabwean English: A Study of Intercultural Communication in the UK.” In Politeness Across Cultures, ed. by Franncesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Daniel Kádár, 171–193. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Haugh, Michael. 2010. “Jocular Mockery, (Dis)affiliation, and Face.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 295–317.
Haugh, Michael. 2015. “The role of English as a Scientific Metalanguage for Research in Pragmatics: Reflections on the Metapragmatics of ‘Politeness’ in Japanese.” East Asian Pragmatics 1: 41–74.
Haugh, Michael, and Dániel Z. Kádár. (forthcoming). The Metapragmatics of Politeness and Impoliteness.
Holtgraves, Thomas. 2005. “The Production and Perception of Implicit Performatives.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 2024–2043.
Hopper, Robert, and Kenneth Drummond. 1990. “Emergent Goals at a Relational Turning Point: The Case of Gordon and Denise.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 9: 39–65.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna2009. “Cancellability and the Primary/Secondary Meaning Distinction.” Intercultural Pragmatics 6: 259–289.
Kádár, Dániel Z. 2013. Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kádár, Dániel Z. 2017. Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Michael Haugh. 2013. Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Rosina Márquez Reiter. 2015. “(Im)politeness and (Im)morality: Insights from Intervention.” Journal of Politeness Research 11: 139–260.
Kanetsuna, Tomoyuki, Peter K. Smith, and Yohji Morita. 2006. “Copying with Bullying at School: Children’s Recommended Strategies and Attitudes to School-based Interventions in England and Japan.” Aggressive Behaviour 32: 570–580.
Kowalski, Robin M., Susan P. Limber, and Patricia W. Agatston. 2008. Cyberbullying: Bullying in the Digital Age. London: Blackwell Publishing.
Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. Harlow: Longman.
Limberg, Holger. 2009. “Impoliteness and Threat Responses.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1376–1394.
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Pilar G. Blitvich, and Particia Bou-Franch. 2011. “On-line Polylogues and Impoliteness: The Case of Postings Sent in Response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube Video.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 2578–2593.
Monks, Claire P., Peter K. Smith, Paul Naylor, Christine Barter, Jane L. Ireland, and Iain Coyne. 2009. “Bullying in Different Contexts: Commonalities, Differences and the Role of Theory.” Aggression and Violent Behaviour 14: 146–156.
Olweus, Dan. 1994. “Bullying at School: Basic Facts and Effects of a School Based Intervention Program.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 35: 1171–1190.
Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington1991. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rayner, Charlotte. 1997. “The Incidence of Workplace Bullying.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 7: 199–208.
Ren, Wei, Ching Yin Lin, and Helen Woodfield. 2013. “Variational Pragmatics in Chinese: Some Insights from an Empirical Study.” In Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics, ed. by Istvan Kecskes, and Jesus Romero-Trillo, 283–314. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sharp, Sonia, and Peter K. Smith (eds) 2002. School Bullying: Insights and Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Silver, Maury, Rosaria Conte, Maria Miceli, and Isabella Poggi. 1986. “Humiliation: Feeling, Social Control and the Construction of Identity.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 16: 269–283.
Smart Richman, Laura, and Mark Leary. 2009. “Reactions to Discrimination, Stigmatization, Ostracism, and Other Forms of Interpersonal Rejection: A Multimotive Model.” Psychological Review 116: 365–383.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2005. “(Im)politeness, Face and Perceptions of Rapport: Unpackaging Their Bases and Interrelationships.” Journal of Politeness Research 1: 95–119.
Tavuchis, Nicholas. 1993. Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Terkourafi, Marina, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2017, in press. “Convention and Ritual.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, and Daniel Kádár. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thomas, Angela. 2007. Youth Online: Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age. Bern: Peter Lang.
Thornborrow, Joanna. 2002. Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional discourse. Harlow: Longman.
Twyman, Kimberly A., Conway F. Saylor, Danielle Saia, Michelle M. Macias, Lloyd A. Taylor, and Eve Spratt. 2010. “Bullying and Ostracism Experiences in Children with Special Health Care Needs.” Journal of Developmental & Behavioural Pediatrics, 31: 1–8.
van Goethem, Anne A.J., Ron H.J. Scholte, and Reinout W. Wiers. 2010. “Explicit and Implicit Bullying Attitudes in Relation to Bullying Behaviour.” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 38: 629–642.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.