Offence and impoliteness are inherently connected, and to some extent they are taken as equivalent (Culpeper, 2011). However, is this connection exclusive? This paper uncovers that offence also interconnects with relational ritual, and that offence and impoliteness cannot be taken as equivalent.

Offence and its responses in computer-mediated context have received much attention, and studies show that offence has relational constructive function (e.g. Perelmutter 2013). However, few studies approach offence from the perspective of relational ritual, and not to mention those that unearth the interconnection between offence and relational ritual.

Witnesses’ responses constitute a relational ritual act (Kádár, 2013, 2017), this study looks into the interconnection between offence and responsive ritual in computer-mediated context, it fulfils a research gap. To be specific, this study investigates offence-witnesses’ responses to offence-takings on individual-centered live-streaming. The data is from a Chinese live-streaming platform yizhibo.com. Individual-centered live-streaming is a kind of ego-centered social media, which provides affordances for cross-modality real-time communication between a streamer and his or her audiences. More than 100 hours of live-streaming from 2015 to 2018 are recorded, and 44 excerpts of offence-taking are selected out of 109. Firstly, the ways of offence-taking and those of witnesses’ relevant responses are identified; then the features of witnesses’ responses are examined, it proves that the responses constitute a relational ritual act. Finally, the interconnection between offence and relational ritual is discussed with computer-mediated evidence.

 

Key words: offence-taking, witnesses’ responses, relational ritual

 

References:

Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence (Vol. 28): Cambridge University Press.

Kádár, D. Z. (2013). Relational rituals and communication: Ritual interaction in groups: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Cambridge University Press.

Perelmutter, R. (2013). Klassika zhanra: The flamewar as a genre in the Russian blogosphere. Journal of Pragmatics, 45(1), 74-89.