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This book provides a ground-breaking, interaction-based framework of rituals, drawing on multiple research disciplines. It examines ritual as a relational action constructed in interaction through pre-existing patterns and captures the features of ritual phenomena by analysing interactants' behaviour in culturally and socially diverse contexts

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Exploring a largely uncharted territory of cultural history and linguistic ethnography, Understanding Historical (Im)Politeness offers in-depth analyses and perceptive interpretations of the conveyance of social-relational meaning in times (long) past and across historical cultures. A collection of essays from the pens of authoritative historical (pragma)-linguistics researchers, the volume examines the forms and functions of historical (im)politeness, varying from single utterances and act sequences to fully-fledged (im)polite speech encounters and genres, with a focus on their period- and culture-bound appraisal. What is more, the book sheds light on what is still very dimly seen: diachronic trends in 'relational work' and the cultural-societal factors behind patterns of sociopragmatic change. The volume reviews theoretical concepts, methods and analytical approaches to improve our present-day understanding of the historical understanding of relational practices of the distant as well as the more recent past. Since it includes newly established themes and positions and breaks new ground, this collection furthers considerably the field of historical (im)politeness research. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 12:1/2 (2011).

Pan and Kadar's exciting research compares historical and contemporary Chinese (im)polite communication norms and maps the similarities and differences between them. Considering the importance of China on the world stage, understanding Chinese politeness norms is pivotal, to both experts of communication studies and those who have interactions with the Chinese community

AbstractThis paper revisits the concept of 'politeness marker', by proposing the bottom-up and corpus-based model of 'ritual frame indicating expressions' (RFIEs). Our central argument is that, in certain linguacultures, the relationship between 'politeness markers' and politeness itself is significantly stronger than in others. Therefore, any theory which argues that there is a definite relationship between form and politeness - or totally rejects this relationship - is potentially problematic if it does not take a contrastive pragmatic perspective, simply because this relationship is subject to significant linguacultural variation. The contrastive pragmatic study of RFIEs also helps us to determine the relationship between forms and speech acts and, indirectly, politeness. As a case study, we examine in this paper one-word and more complex expressions which are commonly associated with the speech acts of request and apology, drawn from the typologically distant Chinese and English linguacultures.