Evaluating the appropriacy of Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs): A case study of learners of Chinese and English

Juliane House; Dániel Z. Kádár

doi:10.1515/lpp-2020-0007

Article

Evaluating the appropriacy of Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs): A case study of learners of Chinese and English

Juliane House
Juliane House is Professor Emerita at the University of Hamburg, and Director of the PhD in Applied Linguistics at Hellenic American University in Athens. She is also Visiting Professor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Dalian University of Foreign Languages. Her research interests involve contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis, politeness, English as a lingua franca and translation. She has published widely in these areas.
and Dániel Z. Kádár
Dániel Z. Kádár is Qihang Chair Professor and Head of Research Centre at Dalian University of Foreign Languages, and Research Professor at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University, Athens. His research interests involve contrastive pragmatics, interactional ritual, linguistic politeness, applied linguistics and language aggression.

Published/Copyright: October 15, 2020

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From the journal Lodz Papers in Pragmatics Volume 16 Issue 1

Abstract

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.

Keywords: ritual frame indicating expressions (RFIEs); standard situations; (meta)pragmatic competence; L2; Chinese; British English

² We would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous Reviewers for their supportive suggestions, as well as to Sara Gesuato and Erik Castello for all their editorial support. On the institutional level, we would like to acknowledge the funding of the MTA Momentum (Lendulet) Research Grant (LP2017/5) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which allowed us to work on this project.

About the authors

Juliane House

Juliane House is Professor Emerita at the University of Hamburg, and Director of the PhD in Applied Linguistics at Hellenic American University in Athens. She is also Visiting Professor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Dalian University of Foreign Languages. Her research interests involve contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis, politeness, English as a lingua franca and translation. She has published widely in these areas.

Dániel Z. Kádár

Dániel Z. Kádár is Qihang Chair Professor and Head of Research Centre at Dalian University of Foreign Languages, and Research Professor at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University, Athens. His research interests involve contrastive pragmatics, interactional ritual, linguistic politeness, applied linguistics and language aggression.

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Published Online: 2020-10-15

Published in Print: 2020-07-28

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2020-0007

Keywords for this article

ritual frame indicating expressions (RFIEs); standard situations; (meta)pragmatic competence; L2; Chinese; British English