Acta Linguistica Academica
Volume/Issue:
Volume 66: Issue 2
Ritual public humiliation
Using pragmatics to model language aggression
Authors:
Dániel Z. Kádár Dalian University of Foreign Languages

Search for other papers by Dániel Z. Kádár in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed Close
and
Puyu Ning North China Electric Power University

Search for other papers by Puyu Ning in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed Close
Pages:
189–208
Online Publication Date:
Jun 2019
Publication Date:
01 Jun 2019
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1556/2062.2019.66.2.3
Open access

Abstract

This paper investigates cases in which people who are perceived to have violated a major communal and/or social norm are humiliated in public in a ritual way. As a case study we examine online videos drawn from the Chinese videosharing site Youku. Humiliation as a form of punishment has been thoroughly studied in sociology (see e.g., the seminal work of Foucault 1977). This interest is not coincidental, considering that studying humiliation may provide insight into the operation of shame as a punitive phenomenon, as well as the role of publicity and complex participation structures when shame is inflicted on others. Yet, punitive humiliation has been understudied in pragmatics; in particular, little research has been done on cases in which it is not an institutionally/socially ratified person (e.g., a judge) but the members of the public who inflict humilation. The study of this phenomenon contributes to the present Special Issue as it demonstrates that pragmatics provides a powerful tool to model the dynamics of (language) behaviour such as humiliation that might be difficult to capture by using more conventional linguistic approaches. We demonstrate that while ritual public communal humiliation tends to be highly aggressive, it also shows noteworthy recurrent (meta)pragmatic similarities with institutionalised forms of punishment.

  • Al-Ameerdy, Riyadh . 2012. Promise and threat in English and Arabic religious texts: A pragmatic study. Al-Ameed Journal. 1. 9–104.

  • Arnovick, Leslie . 1999. Diachronic Pragmatics: Seven case studies in English Illocutionary development. Amsterdam & Philadelpia: John Benjamins.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Baumgartner, Mary Pat 1988. The moral order of a suburb. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Bax, Marcel . 2010. Rituals. In: A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen (eds) Handbook of pragmatics, Vol. 8: Historical pragmatics. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 483–519.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Bedford, Olwen and Hwang Kwang-Kuo. 2003. Guilt and shame in Chinese culture: A cross-cultural framework from the perspective of morality and identity. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 33. 127–144.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Birrell, Susan . 1981. Sport as ritual: Interpretations from Durkheim to Goffman. Social Forces. 60. 354–376.

  • Chapman, Richard . 2010. Naming or shaming? Presentations of the self in specialised weblog discourse. Iperstoria. 10. 45–54.

  • Culpeper, Jonathan . 2011. Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Cunningham, Michael R., Alan R. Roberts, Anita P. Barbee, Perri B. Druen and Cheng-Huan Wu. 1995. “Their ideas of beauty are, on the whole, the same as ours”: Consistency and variability in the cross-cultural perception of female physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 68. 261–279.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Foucault, Michel . 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of prison. New York: Pantheon.

  • Goffman, Erving . 1981. Forms of talk. Philadeplhia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  • Habermas, Jurgen . 1999. Moral Consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

  • Haidt, Jonathan . 2012. The moral mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. London: Penguin.

  • Handel, Warren . 2016. Pragmatic conventions: A frame for a theory of action and interaction. The Sociological Quarterly. 44. 133–157.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Haslam, Nick, Steve Loughnan and Pamela Sun. 2011. Beastly: What makes animal metaphors offensive? Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 30. 311–325.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Jacobsen, Bente . 2008. Interactional pragmatics and court interpreting: The analysis of face. Interpreting. 10. 128–158.

  • Kádár, Dániel Z . 2017. Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Kádár, Dániel Z. and Michael Haugh. 2013. Understanding politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Kádár, Dániel Z. and Rosina Márquez-Reiter. 2015. (Im)politeness and (im)morality: Insights from intervention. Journal of Politeness Research. 10. 239–260.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Kádár, Dániel Z., Puyu Ning and Yongping Ran. 2018. Ritual public apology: A case study of Chinese. Discourse, Context & Media. 26. 21–31.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Klinken, Gerry van . 2007. Communal violence and democratization in Indonesia – Small town wars. London: Routledge.

  • Kohlberg, Lawrance and Richard. Hersh. 1977. Moral development: A review of the theory. Theory Into Practice. 16. 53–59.

  • Lankenau, Stephen E . 1990. Stronger than dirt: Public humiliation and status enhancement among panhandlers. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 28. 288–318.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Liao, Yuan and Michael Bond. 2011. The dynamics of face-loss following interpersonal harm for Chinese and Americans. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 42. 25–38.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Márquez-Reiter, Rosina . 2000. Linguistic politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive study of requests and apologies. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Mullen, Brian . 1986. Atrocity as a function of lynch mob composition: A self-attention perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 12. 187–197.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Pearce, W. Barnett and Stephen W. Littlejohn. 1997. Moral conflict: When social worlds collide. New York: Sage.

  • Perlemutter, Renee . 2015. Shaming, group face, and identity construction in a Russian virtual community for women. In: M. Terkourafi (ed.) Interdisciplinary perspectives on im/politeness. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 149–180.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Santamaría García, Carmen . 2000. Teasing and shaming routines in adult-children interaction. In: M. Pilar Navarro Errasti et al. (eds.) Transcultural communication: Pragmalinguistic aspects. Zaragoza: Anubar Ediciones. 235–242.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Shafer-Landau, Russ . 1997. Moral rules. Ethics. 107. 584–611.

  • Smith, Richard, Matthew Webster, Gerrod Parrott and Heidi Eyre. 2002. The role of public exposure in moral and non-moral shame and guild. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 83. 138–159.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Spierenburg, Pieter . 2004. Punishment, power, and history: Foucault and Elias. Social Science History. 28. 607–636.

  • Wang, Kailun . 2009. The deviant: Examining the relationship between foxes and humans in Chinese literature. Sino-Platonic Papers. 193. 4–15.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

  • Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Beavin Bevelas and Don D. Jackson. 2011. Pragmatics of Human communication: A study of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. New York: W. W. Norton.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Collapse
  • Expand
Cover Acta Linguistica Academica
Acta Linguistica Academica An International Journal of Linguistics
Print ISSN:
2559-8201
Online ISSN:
2560-1016

The author instruction is available in PDF.
Please, download the file from HERE. 

Editors

Editor-in-Chief: András Cser

Editor: György Rákosi

Review Editor: Tamás Halm

Editorial Board

  • Anne Abeillé / Université Paris Diderot
  • Željko Bošković / University of Connecticut
  • Marcel den Dikken / Eötvös Loránd University; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Hans-Martin Gärtner / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Elly van Gelderen / Arizona State University
  • Anders Holmberg / Newcastle University
  • Katarzyna Jaszczolt / University of Cambridge
  • Dániel Z. Kádár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • István Kenesei / University of Szeged; Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Anikó Lipták / Leiden University
  • Katalin Mády / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gereon Müller / Leipzig University
  • Csaba Pléh / Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Central European University
  • Giampaolo Salvi / Eötvös Loránd University
  • Irina Sekerina / College of Staten Island CUNY
  • Péter Siptár / Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest
  • Gregory Stump / University of Kentucky
  • Peter Svenonius / University of Tromsø
  • Anne Tamm / Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church
  • Akira Watanabe / University of Tokyo
  • Jeroen van de Weijer / Shenzhen University

 

Acta Linguistica Academica
Address: Benczúr u. 33. HU–1068 Budapest, Hungary
Phone: (+36 1) 351 0413; (+36 1) 321 4830 ext. 154
Fax: (36 1) 322 9297
E-mail: ala@nytud.mta.hu

Indexing and Abstracting Services:

  • Arts and Humanities Citation Index
  • Bibliographie Linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography
  • International Bibliographies IBZ and IBR
  • Linguistics Abstracts
  • Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts
  • MLA International Bibliography
  • SCOPUS
  • Social Science Citation Index
  • LinguisList

 

2022  
Web of Science  
Total Cites
WoS		 56
Journal Impact Factor 0.5
Rank by Impact Factor

Linguistics (Q4)
Impact Factor
without
Journal Self Cites		 0.4
5 Year
Impact Factor		 0.5
Journal Citation Indicator 0.59
Rank by Journal Citation Indicator

Language and Linguistics (Q2)
Linguistics (Q3)
Scimago  
Scimago
H-index		 13
Scimago
Journal Rank		 0.592
Scimago Quartile Score

Cultural Studies (Q1)
Linguistics and Language (Q1)
Literature and Literary Theory (Q1)
Scopus  
Scopus
Cite Score		 1.4
Scopus
CIte Score Rank		 Literature and Literary Theory 24/982 (97th PCTL)
Cultural Studies 212/1203 (82nd PCTL)
Scopus
SNIP		 1.159

2021  
Web of Science  
Total Cites
WoS		 63
Journal Impact Factor 0,690
Rank by Impact Factor

Linguistics 145/194
Impact Factor
without
Journal Self Cites		 0,667
5 Year
Impact Factor		 1,286
Journal Citation Indicator 0,67
Rank by Journal Citation Indicator

Language & Linguistics 141/370
Scimago  
Scimago
H-index		 11
Scimago
Journal Rank		 0,341
Scimago Quartile Score Cultural Studies (Q1)
Linguistics and Language (Q1)
Literature and Literary Theory (Q1)
Scopus  
Scopus
Cite Score		 1,4
Scopus
CIte Score Rank		 Literature and Literary Theory 22/934 (D1)
Cultural Studies 164/1127 (Q1)
Scopus
SNIP		 1,070

2020

 

Total Cites

219

WoS

Journal
Impact Factor

0,523

Rank by

Linguistics 150/193 (Q4)

Impact Factor

 

Impact Factor

0,432

without

Journal Self Cites

5 Year

0,500

Impact Factor

Journal 

0,72

Citation Indicator

 

Rank by Journal 

Linguistics 144/259 (Q3)

Citation Indicator 

 

Citable

19

Items

Total

19

Articles

Total

0

Reviews

Scimago

10

H-index

Scimago

0,295

Journal Rank

Scimago

Cultural Studies Q1

Quartile Score

Language and Linguistics Q2

 

Linguistics and Language Q2

 

Literature and Literary Theory Q1

Scopus

72/87=0,8

Scite Score

Scopus

Literature and Literary Theory 42/825 (Q1)

Scite Score Rank

Cultural Studies 247/1037 (Q1)

Scopus

1,022

SNIP

Days from 

58

submission

to acceptance

Days from 

68

acceptance

to publication

Acceptance

51%
Rate

2019  
Total Cites
WoS		 155
Impact Factor 0,222
Impact Factor
without
Journal Self Cites		 0,156
5 Year
Impact Factor		 0,322
Immediacy
Index		 0,870
Citable
Items		 23
Total
Articles		 23
Total
Reviews		 0
Cited
Half-Life		 11,2
Citing
Half-Life		 16,6
Eigenfactor
Score		 0,00006
Article Influence
Score		 0,056
% Articles
in
Citable Items		 100,00
Normalized
Eigenfactor		 0,00780
Average
IF
Percentile		 9,358
Scimago
H-index		 9
Scimago
Journal Rank		 0,281
Scopus
Scite Score		 53/85=0,6
Scopus
Scite Score Rank		 Cultural Studies 293/1002 (Q2)
Literature and Literary Theory 60/823(Q1)
Scopus
SNIP		 0,768
Acceptance
Rate		 25%

 

Acta Linguistica Academica
Publication Model Hybrid
Submission Fee none
Article Processing Charge 900 EUR/article
Printed Color Illustrations 40 EUR (or 10 000 HUF) + VAT / piece
Regional discounts on country of the funding agency World Bank Lower-middle-income economies: 50%
World Bank Low-income economies: 100%
Further Discounts Editorial Board / Advisory Board members: 50%
Corresponding authors, affiliated to an EISZ member institution subscribing to the journal package of Akadémiai Kiadó: 100%
Subscription fee 2023 Online subsscription: 572 EUR / 696 USD
Print + online subscription: 656 EUR / 796 USD
Subscription Information Online subscribers are entitled access to all back issues published by Akadémiai Kiadó for each title for the duration of the subscription, as well as Online First content for the subscribed content.
Purchase per Title Individual articles are sold on the displayed price.

Acta Linguistica Academica
Language English
Size B5
Year of
Foundation		 2017 (1951)
Volumes
per Year		 1
Issues
per Year		 4
Founder Magyar Tudományos Akadémia   
Founder's
Address		 H-1051 Budapest, Hungary, Széchenyi István tér 9.
Publisher Akadémiai Kiadó
Publisher's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
Responsible
Publisher		 Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN 2559-8201 (Print)
ISSN 2560-1016 (Online)

Monthly Content Usage

Abstract Views Full Text Views PDF Downloads
Jun 2023 0 14 163
Jul 2023 0 70 278
Aug 2023 0 39 41
Sep 2023 0 32 21
Oct 2023 0 28 28
Nov 2023 0 28 25
Dec 2023 0 18 4