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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 31:3 (2021) ► pp.382–405

Taking it too far

The role of ideological discourses in contesting the limits of teasing and offence

ORCID logo | The University of Queensland
ORCID logo | The University of Queensland
ORCID logo | National Taiwan Normal University
While teasing can cause offence, participants on television variety or game shows are generally expected to tolerate it. In this paper, we examine comments posted on YouTube in response to reports of a leaked recording of a television host in Taiwan swearing at and insulting a guest who teased the host about his “inability to take a defeat”. In so doing, we examine both the perceived limits of teasing (i.e. what is considered allowable and what goes too far), and the perceived limits of taking offence in response to teasing (i.e. what ways of indicating offence are considered allowable and what goes too far). We conclude that instances where there are disputes about whether taking offence is warranted by the teasing in question provides us with a useful lens to examine the role ideological discourses play in (re-)constituting the underlying moral fabric of social interaction.
Keywords: teasing, offence, morality, metapragmatics, broadcast media, digitally-mediated communication, Mandarin Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Teasing, offence and morality
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Analytical approach
  • 4.The role of ideological discourses in construing teasing and the taking of offence as moral breaches
    • 4.1Discourses about intergenerational discord
    • 4.2Discourses about moral character
    • 4.3Discourses on moral culpability
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 21 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20003.cha
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Lee, Cher Leng & Daoning Zhu
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Sinkeviciute, Valeria
2022. Teasing. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 156 ff. DOI logo
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