Article published In:
The Pragmatics of RitualEdited by Dániel Z. Kádár and Juliane House
[Pragmatics 30:1] 2020
► pp. 142–168
Edited by Dániel Z. Kádár and Juliane House
[Pragmatics 30:1] 2020
► pp. 142–168
Ritual frames
A contrastive pragmatic approach
Our study provides a corpus-based contrastive pragmatic investigation of the expressions please in English and
qing
请 in Chinese. We define such expressions as ‘ritual
frame indicating expressions’ (henceforth RFIEs) and argue that RFIEs are deployed in settings where it is important to show
awareness of the rights and obligations. ‘Ritual frame’ encompasses a cluster of standard situations. On the one hand the
corpus-based investigation of ritual provides an innovative complement to sociopragmatic approaches to ritual behaviour because
they reveal how RFIEs that indicate ritual spread across a cluster of standard situations. On the other hand, it allows the
researcher to contrast the scope of ritual across lingua-cultures by comparatively looking into the standard situations in which a
particular RFIE is deployed. Findings of our data analysis point to intriguing differences between English and Chinese RFIEs, as
well as relevant lingua-cultural reasons behind such differences.
Keywords: standard situation, ritual-frame indicating-expression (RFIE), contrastive pragmatic analysis, corpora, Chinese, English
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Introducing ritual frame indicating expressions
- 1.2Positioning the concept of RFIE in the field
- 2.Analytical framework
- 3.Method of data collection
- 4.Data analysis
- 4.1The English dataset
- 4.1.1Service encounters
- 4.1.2Institutional with power-salience
- 4.1.3Institutional without power-salience
- 4.1.4Public display
- 4.2The Chinese dataset
- 4.2.1Ceremonial
- 4.2.2Institutional with power-salience
- 4.2.3Institutional without power-salience
- 4.2.4Public displays
- 4.1The English dataset
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
References (51)
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Andersen, Gisle. 2014. “Pragmatic Borrowing.” Journal of Pragmatics 671: 17–33. 
Barsalou, Lawrence. 1992. “Frames, Concepts and Conceptual Fields.” In Frames, Fields and Contrasts, ed. by Adrienne Lehrer, and Eva Feder Kittay, 21–74. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bax, Marcel. 2010. “Rituals.” In Historical Pragmatics, ed. by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, 483–521. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bednarek, Monika. 2005. “Frames Revisited: The Coherence-Inducing Function of Frames.” Journal of Pragmatics 371: 685–705.
Braun, Friederike. 1988. Terms of Address: Problems of Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Coulmas, Florian. 1981. “Conversational Routine.” In Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 1–18. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2010. Conventionalised Impoliteness Formulae. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (12): 3232–3245.
Dai, Jin-huei. 2007. “Love You” Doesn’t Mean “I Love You”: Just a Way to Say Goodbye. The Nature of Leave-taking and its Pragmatic Applications in Mandarin Chinese. In 2007 Selected Papers from Pragmatics in the CJK Classroom: The State of the Art, ed. by Dina R. Yoshimi and Haidan Wang. Retrieved from: [URL]
Edmondson, Willis. 1985. “Discourse Worlds in the Classroom and in Foreign Language Learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 7 (2): 159–168.
Fillmore, Charles. 1982. “Frame Semantics.” In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, ed. by Linguistic Society of Korea, 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin.
Gleason, Jean Berko, Rivka Y. Perlmann, and Esther Blank Greif. 1984. “What’s the Magic Word: Learning Language through Politeness Routines.” Discourse Processes 7 (4): 493–502.
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press.
Harris, Sandra. 1995. “Pragmatics and Power.” Journal of Pragmatics 23 (2): 117–135.
House, Juliane. 1989. “Politeness in English and German: The Functions of Please and Bitte.” In Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, ed. by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House, and Gabriel Kasper, 96–119. Norwood, N.J.
House, Juliane, and Gabriele Kasper. 1981. “Politeness Markers in English and German.” In Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 157–186. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ide, Sachiko. 1989. “Formal Forms and Discernment: Two Neglected Aspects of Universals of Linguistic Politeness.” Multilingua 8 (2/3): 223–248.
Johnson, David. 2009. Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kádár, Dániel Z. 2013. Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
2017. Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Juliane House. 2020. Evaluating the Appropriacy of Using Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs) – A case study of learners of Chinese and English. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics.
. Forthcoming. Contrastive Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kádár, Dániel Z., Puyu Ning, and Yongping Ran. 2018. “Public Ritual Apology – A Case Study of Chinese.” Discourse, Context and Media 261: 21–31.
Kampf, Zohar. 2009. “Public (non-) Apologies: The Discourse of Minimizing Responsibility.” Journal of Pragmatics 41 (11): 2257–2270.
Kecskes, Istvan. 2016. “Situation-bound Utterances in Chinese. East Asian Pragmatics 1 (1): 107–126.
Lakoff, Robin. 1972. “Language in Context.” Language 48 (4): 907–927.
. 1990. Talking Power: The Politics of Language. London: Basic Books.
Lee-Wong, Song Mei. 1994. “Qing/Please – A Polite or Requestive Marker? Observations from Chinese.” Multilingua 13 (4): 343–360.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1979. “Activity Types and Language.” Linguistics 17 (5/6): 365–399.
Ma, Naitian. 2003. “试说兼语结构与“请”” [A tentative study on concurrent structure and the usage of the word ‘Please’]. Journal of Henan Institute of Technology 22 (4): 78–80.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. Hamburg: Servus.
Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. English translation by W. D. Halls. London: Routledge.
Mey, Jacob. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction (2nd Edition). Oxford: Blackwell.
Pizziconi, Barbara. 2003. “Re-examining Politeness, Face and the Japanese Language.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (10/11): 1471–1506.
Sarangi, Srikant. 2014. “Activity Types, Discourse Types and Interactional Hybridity: The Case of Genetic Counselling.” In Discourse and Social Life, ed. by Srikant Sarangi, and Malcolm Coulthard, 1–27. London: Routledge.
Schank, Roger, and Robert Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sharoff, Serge, Reinhard Rapp, Pierre Zweigenbaim, and Pascale Fung. 2013. Building and Using Comparable Corpora. New York: Springer.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. (ed.). 2000. Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum.
Tannen, Deborah. 1979. “What’s in a Frame? Service Evidence for Underlaying Expectations. In New Directions in Discourse Processing, ed. by Roy Friedl, 14–56. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Terkourafi, Marina. 2001. “Politeness in Cypriot Greek: A Frame-Based Approach.” PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.
Terkourafi, Maria. 2005. “Beyond the Micro-Level of Politeness Research.” Journal of Politeness Research 1 (1): 237–262.
. 2011. “The Puzzle of Indirect Speech.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (11): 2861–2865.
Turner, Victor. 1979. “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 (4): 465–499.
Van Mulken, Margot. 1996. “Politeness Markers in French and Dutch Requests.” Language Sciences 18 (3/4): 689–702.
Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wichmann, Anne. 2004. “The Intonation of Please-Requests: A Corpus-Based Study.” Journal of Pragmatics 36 (9): 1521–1549.
Woodfield, Helen, and Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis. 2010. “‘I just need more time’: A Study of Native and Non-Native Students’ Requests to Faculty for an Extension.” Multilingua 29 (1): 77–118.
Cited by (38)
Cited by 38 other publications
Jia, Yunhan
2024. The English politeness marker please in Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 230 ► pp. 154 ff. 
Kádár, Dániel Z., Juliane House, Keiko Todo & Tingting Xiao
2024. Revisiting the binary view of honorifics in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research 20:2 ► pp. 533 ff.
Tantucci, Vittorio & Carmen Lepadat
2024. Verbal engagement in doctor–patient interaction: Resonance in Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Journal of Pragmatics 230 ► pp. 126 ff.
Chen, Rong
2023. The Rituals of Pragmatics. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff.
House, Juliane, Dániel Z Kádár, Fengguang Liu & Shiyu Liu
2023. Greeting in English as a Foreign Language: A Problem for Speakers of Chinese. Applied Linguistics 44:2 ► pp. 189 ff.
House, Juliane, Dániel Z. Kádár, Fengguang Liu & Wenrui Shi
2023. Historical language use in Europe from a contrastive pragmatic perspective. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24:1 ► pp. 143 ff.
Li, Hui & Jie Ji
2023. Native observers’ evaluations of ritual frame indicating expressions in Chinese. Journal of Politeness Research 19:2 ► pp. 461 ff.
Liao, Guohai & Dengshan Xia
2023. Historical poem-quoting interaction: An interaction-speech act-ritual integrative study of fù in ancient China. Journal of Pragmatics 214 ► pp. 21 ff.
Liu, Fengguang, Wenrui Shi, Dániel Z. Kádár & Juliane House
2023. Criticising as a disciplinary action: A problem for learners of Chinese as a foreign language?. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 33:3 ► pp. 508 ff.
Qiu, Jia, Xinren Chen & Yanli Cao
2023. A contrastive analysis of congratulate by native speakers of Chinese and advanced learners of Chinese. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 33:3 ► pp. 476 ff.
Rygg, Kristin & Stine Hulleberg Johansen
2023. When the Norwegian ‘politeness marker’ vennligst becomes impolite. Journal of Politeness Research 19:2 ► pp. 439 ff.
Yang, Na & Jiabei Hu
Li, Hui
2022.
Keqi (客气) in historical Chinese: evidence from metapragmatic comments. Journal of Politeness Research 18:2 ► pp. 403 ff.
Miller, Shelby R., Hilal Ergül & Salvatore Attardo
Qian, Leyi
2022. Beyond negation: “Not” as evaluation and speech-act trigger in Mandarin Chinese negative markers. Journal of Pragmatics 187 ► pp. 147 ff.
Ren, Wei
2022. Effects of proficiency and gender on learners’ use of the pragmatic marker 吧ba. Lingua 277 ► pp. 103405 ff.
Ren, Wei & Saeko Fukushima
2022. Perception and evaluation of requests on social media in Chinese and Japanese. Language & Communication 87 ► pp. 231 ff.
House, Juliane, Dániel Z. Kádár, Fengguang Liu & Zhuo Bi
2021. Altered speech act indication: A problem for foreign language learners?. System 101 ► pp. 102554 ff.
House, Juliane, Dániel Z. Kádár, Fengguang Liu, Shiyu Liu, Wenrui Shi, Zongfeng Xia & Lin Jiao
2021. Interaction, speech acts and ritual: An integrative model. Lingua 257 ► pp. 103082 ff.
Jia, Mian & Guoping Yang
2021. Emancipating Chinese (im)politeness research: Looking back and looking forward. Lingua 251 ► pp. 103028 ff.
Kampf, Zohar
2021. Political speech acts in contrast: The case of calls to condemn in news interviews. Journal of Pragmatics 180 ► pp. 203 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z. & Juliane House
2021. Ritual frames and mimesis: Analysing military training in Chinese universities. Language & Communication 80 ► pp. 25 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z. & Juliane House
2021. ‘Politeness Markers’ Revisited - A Contrastive Pragmatic Perspective. Journal of Politeness Research 17:1 ► pp. 79 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z. & Juliane House
2021. Interaction Ritual and (Im)Politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 179 ► pp. 54 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z. & Juliane House
2021. Conventionalization and Conventions. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 162 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z., Juliane House, Fengguang Liu & Yulong Song
2021. Admonishing. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 31:2 ► pp. 173 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z. & Ling Zhou
2021.
Self-Denigration in 21st Century Chinese
. Journal of Politeness Research 17:2 ► pp. 265 ff.
Liu, Fengguang, Dan Han, Dániel Z. Kádár & Juliane House
2021. The expressions ‘(M)minzu-zhuyi’ and ‘Nationalism’: A contrastive pragmatic analysis. Journal of Pragmatics 174 ► pp. 168 ff.
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2020. Evaluating the appropriacy of Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs): A case study of learners of Chinese and English. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 16:1 ► pp. 153 ff.
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2020. T/V pronouns in global communication practices: The case of IKEA catalogues across linguacultures. Journal of Pragmatics 161 ► pp. 1 ff.
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics,
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2021. Altered speech act indication: A contrastive pragmatic study of English and Chinese Thank and Greet expressions. Lingua 264 ► pp. 103162 ff.
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2021. German and Japanese war crime apologies: A contrastive pragmatic study. Journal of Pragmatics 177 ► pp. 109 ff.
House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2022. Political Language in Contrast: An Introduction. Journal of Pragmatics 188 ► pp. 132 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z.
2020. Review of Freytag (2020): Exploring Politeness in Business Emails: A Mixed-Methods Analysis. Pragmatics and Society 11:4 ► pp. 669 ff.
Ran, Yongping, Linsen Zhao & Dániel Z. Kádár
2020. The rite of reintegrative shaming in Chinese public dispute mediation. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 30:1 ► pp. 40 ff.
Xie, Chaoqun, Ying Tong & Francisco Yus
2020. Bonding across Chinese social media. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 30:3 ► pp. 431 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 13 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 october 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.