Interaction Ritual and (Im)Politeness

This paper provides insight into interaction ritual theory, by devoting special attention to the interface between interaction ritual and (im)politeness. We focus on several key pragmatic features of interaction ritual, illustrating their operation. We also describe different research approaches for systematically studying interaction rituals. Finally, we present a case-study of Chinese university military trainings to illustrate the operation of ritual in a morally loaded aggressive scenario. Our study shows that interaction ritual theory provides an analytic focus on recurrent and as such replicable aspects of language use. This sense of replicability is indispensable if we want to model language use across linguacultures. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.