2 - Interaction Ritual: The Basics

Summary

Chapter 2 positions ritual in the field of pragmatics. The chapter first provides an overview of previous pragmatic research on ritual and discusses why Goffman’s term ‘interaction ritual’ is particularly useful to describe what ritual is from the pragmatician’s point of view. The chapter then considers why ritual offers a powerful perspective through which one can approach and interpret language use across different linguacultures and context types. It is also shown that an analytic model based on ritual provides a different and often more accurate view of many instances of conventionalised language use than the oft-used politeness paradigm. Finally, the chapter defines the key pragmatic features of ritual as elements of a pragmatic approach to ritual and language. Interpreting ritual through this cluster of pragmatic features allows the researcher to venture beyond any single working definition.