In Chapter 5, we examine those expressions through which language users conventionally indicate illocutionary acts such as requesting. We define these expressions as Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs), arguing that they are recurrently used to indicate illocutionary acts in specific standard situations with preset rights and obligations for participants. Learning and teaching the use of such expressions can be particularly difficult due to their interactional load and linguacultural specificity.

In Chapter 7, we discuss expressions, constituting the ‘lowest’ unit of analysis in our model. We here focus specifically on pragmatically salient conventionalised expressions indicating the interactants’ rights and obligations in a particular context. We propose an analytic procedure by means of which such expressions can be systematically compared by using large corpora. As a case study, we examine Chinese and British English expressions. We focus on expressions popularly associated with the speech acts Request and Apologise. We examine groups of expressions with an increasing degree of complexity.