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7 - Liminality

from Part II - Ritual Frame in Interaction: The Complex Interactional Features of Ritual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2024

Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China and Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
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Summary

Chapter 7 discusses liminality from a pragmatic point of view. All interactionally complex rituals take the participants through a threshold to some degree, in that the rights and obligations and related conventions of pragmatic behaviour holding for rituals tend to differ from their counterparts in ‘ordinary’ life. Yet, it is relevant to study fully-fledged liminal rituals with a sense of irreversibility. For example, ritual public apologies are liminal in the fully-fledged sense because the person who realises such ritual apologies passes a threshold with no return. Liminal rituals come together with strong metapragmatic awareness: if the moral order and the related frame of the ritual are violated, both the participants and the observers tend to become alerted and engage in intensive metapragmatic reflections. Chapter 7 will present a case study focusing on the liminal rite of workplace dismissal. Such dismissals represent typical liminal rituals in the very sense of the word: they change the life of the recipient and as such they are very meaningful and irreversible. Because of this, perceived ‘errors’ in the realisation of this ritual tends to trigger particularly intensive metapragmatic reflections and evaluations.

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Ritual and Language , pp. 110 - 126
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Kádár, D. (2017) Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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  • Liminality
  • Dániel Z. Kádár, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China and Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
  • Book: Ritual and Language
  • Online publication: 07 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108624909.007
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  • Liminality
  • Dániel Z. Kádár, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China and Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
  • Book: Ritual and Language
  • Online publication: 07 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108624909.007
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Liminality
  • Dániel Z. Kádár, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China and Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
  • Book: Ritual and Language
  • Online publication: 07 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108624909.007
Available formats
×