Chapters 10 and 11 provide a solution for the study of interactionally complex ritual phenomena, by systematically breaking them down into replicable pragmatic units of analysis. The complexity of a ritual phenomenon can either mean that a phenomenon is too broad to be discussed as a single ritual, i.e., it represents a form of ritual behaviour which spans across many different ritual contexts, or it represents a particular context and related ritual frame which triggers ritual behaviour but cannot be subsumed under a single ritual heading from the pragmatician’s point of view. Chapter 11 focuses on the second type of difficulty: it proposes a discourse-analytic approach through which seemingly ad hoc and erratic interactional ritual behaviour in a single complex ritual frame can be studied in a replicable way. As a case study, the chapter will examine ritual bargaining in Chinese markets. While bargaining is a ritual in the popular sense of the word, it is problematic from the pragmatician’s point of view to refer to bargaining as a ritual, without considering whether and how it manifests itself in recurrent patterns of ritual language use.

Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which the ritual perspective can help the researcher to systematically describe seemingly ad hoc interactional events. Ritual aggression can be a challenging phenomenon to study for two reasons. Firstly, in-group ritual aggression often appears to be ‘violent’ and, more importantly, ‘unreasonable’ for group outsiders. For instance, ritual cursing is normative for certain ethnic groups but may sound menacing for members of other groups, often leading to racist stereotypes and prejudices. A clear advantage of the ritual perspective is that it allows the researcher to describe exactly the pragmatic conventions of such rituals in a rigorous and replicable way, and on a par with rites of civility. Secondly, other less ‘exotic’ aggressive interaction rituals also often manifest themselves in forms that one may describe as ‘violent’ and ‘unreasonable’. The ritual perspective also helps the scholar to capture the pragmatic conventions and dynamics of these social rituals, which are the focus of Chapter 3. As a case study the chapter examines language use before, during and after a ‘grudge match’ in a Mixed Martial Arts event.

Chapter 6 provides a summary of our cross-cultural pragmatic analytic framework. The framework breaks down cross-cultural pragmatic data into three units of analysis, expressions, speech acts and discourse, and provides a systematic approach to disentangle and compare these units across linguacultures.