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The present paper is based on an interview, conducted by Victor V. Leontyev with Juliane House and Dániel Z. Kádár. It provides an overview of a new theory in pragmatics, namely, Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs). This theory provides a bottom-up and corpus-based approach to the study of various pragmatically important expressions through which the participants of an interaction indicate their awareness of the Ritual Frame underlying the interaction. 'Ritual Frame' encompasses a cluster of standard situations in which the rights and obligations of the participants are clearly defined. The corpus-based RFIE approach complements sociopragmatic approaches to various expression types, including so-called 'politeness markers', honorifics, forms of address and so on, and it also helps us to systematically capture the relationship between expressions and speech acts. In studying RFIEs, the analyst focuses on the ways in which RFIEs spread across various standard situations. The study of this issue also allows the researcher to contrastively examine the use of RFIEs across linguacultures. Such contrastive research helps us to unearth major linguacultural differences. For example, the research of J. House and D.Z. Kádár has revealed that while in East Asian linguacultures such as Chinese RFIEs tend to be strongly associated with a particular speech act, this relationship is casual in Western linguacultures.

In this academic note, we aim to outline the foundations of a major L2 pragmatic project that we have been engaged in over the past few years. We believe the readers may find our system and its typology relevant to their own research studies. Central categorical parts of the project; that is to say, speech acts and interaction, are introduced in detail. More illustrations are followed using typical Persian examples on how refusal, as a popular category of speech acts in L2 (cross-cultural) pragmatics, can be analysed in our system, keeping in mind the target audience of the present contribution.

This handbook comprehensively examines social interaction by providing a critical overview of the field of linguistic politeness and impoliteness. Authored by over forty leading scholars, it offers a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to a vast array of themes that are vital to the study of interpersonal communication. The chapters explore the use of (im)politeness in specific contexts as well as wider developments, and variations across cultures and contexts in understandings of key concepts (such as power, emotion, identity and ideology). Within each chapter, the authors select a topic and offer a critical commentary on the key linguistic concepts associated with it, supporting their assertions with case studies that enable the reader to consider the practicalities of (im)politeness studies. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of linguistics, particularly those concerned with pragmatics, sociolinguistics and interpersonal communication. Its multidisciplinary nature means that it is also relevant to researchers across the social sciences and humanities, particularly those working in sociology, psychology and history.

In this research report, we present some of the outcomes of our joint work dedicated to cross-cultural pragmatics, i.e. the field of studying language use in a contrastive way across languages and language varieties. We use the vague wording “some” here because it is clearly beyond the scope of a brief report like this to include all or even most of the outcomes of four years of joint work. Also, we are aware of the fact that Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica is a journal with an interest in many areas of linguistics, and pragmatics is only one of these areas, and so we wish to avoid bombarding the reader with technical details of our research. Instead, we believe that it is much better to proceed in this research report by introducing those aspects of our work that are relevant to other areas of linguistic research as well. For readers with interest in more details of our work, we would like to refer here to the following book: Juliane House and Dániel Z. Kádár 2021. Cross-cultural Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this study, we examine ritual Small Talk in Chinese, which is a regretfully understudied phenomenon. We investigate recurrent pragmatic features of Chinese Small Talk in an audio-recorded corpus through the lens of speech acts. We interpret the use of speech acts with the aid of interaction ritual theory and linguistic politeness. As a case study, we examine instances of Small Talk taking place in the vicinity of a Chinese primary school where parents and grandparents engaged in casual phatic conversations to kill the time while waiting for the children. The study of our corpus of Small Talk conversations allows us to unearth linguaculturally embedded patterns of language use in a complex participatory setting where parents and grandparents interact in front of a school.

In this paper, we present a contrastive pragmatic analysis of Small Talk in English and Chinese. We use a radically minimal, finite and interactional system of speech acts to study DCTs conducted with U.S. American native speakers of English and native speakers of Chinese. Our analysis points to a number of important differences between Small Talk in the two linguacultures contrasted, such as a reliance on routines in English Small Talk, and an overall reliance on the speech act Remark in Chinese. The influence of the classic sociolinguistic variables Power and Social Distance for the enactment of Small Talk is also shown to be different in English and Chinese.

In this introduction to the present special issue, we first define the notion of Small Talk from a pragmatic point of view and interconnect Small Talk with interaction ritual. Following this, we point out why a speech act-based approach is particularly useful to study Small Talk in a rigorous and replicable way. We also introduce the speech act framework used by all the studies in the special issue. Finally, we introduce the contents of the special issue.

This paper investigates the evaluation of ritual frame indicating expressions (RFIEs) in two groups of L2 learners: British English learners of Chinese and Mainland Chinese learners of English. RFIEs are expressions by means of which speakers confirm their awareness of rights and obligations in a particular standard situation. Previous research in applied linguistics has largely ignored the production and evaluation of such forms, despite the fact that they are pragmatically-loaded and, as such, are very important for the development of the (meta)pragmatic competence of L2 learners. In our study, we have conducted an experiment in which we exposed our learners to both authentic and constructed uses of RFIEs. The evaluation of their (meta)pragmatic competence has revealed notable linguacultural differences between the two groups of L2 learners.

In this position paper, we argue that second language (L2) pragmatic research needs to explore new avenues for integrating speech acts and interaction, by proposing a radically minimal, finite and interactional typology of speech acts. While we will introduce what we mean by integrating speech acts and interaction in detail below, the following argument helps us to summarise the issue we consider in this study: When we describe language behaviour, we sometimes use terms such as ‘suggest’, ‘request’ and so on, which roughly indicate illocutionary values, and sometimes terms such as ‘agree’, ‘accept’, ‘contradict’, ‘turn down’, ‘refuse’, which are more indicative of the significance of the utterance relative to a preceding one. What we need to do is to distinguish between these two aspects of a communicative act – the illocutionary and the interactional. (Edmondson et al., 2023, pp. 25–26)