Ritual frame indicating expressions (an academic conversation)

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.