Ritual in intercultural contact: A metapragmatic case study of heckling Dániel Z. Kádár a, * , Yongping Ran b a Centre for Intercultural Politeness Research, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom b Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, P.R. China Received 31 January 2014; received in revised form 24 October 2014; accepted 23 December 2014 Abstract The present paper examines how interpersonal ritual notions are appropriated in intercultural contact, hence filling a knowledge gap in intercultural and cross-cultural pragmatics. As a case study, we examine how the English metalexeme ‘heckling’ has been appropriated in Chinese and Japanese cultures. We argue that the history and pragmatic features of native heckling metalexemes in Chinese and Japanese strongly influence the way in which English ‘heckling’ has been incorporated into these cultures. By studying the relationship between intercultural appropriation and metalexical history, we aim to draw attention to the importance of examining culture-specific metalexemes in intercultural research on rituals and other interpersonal pragmatic phenomena. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Ritual(isation); Appropriation; Intercultural pragmatics; Metapragmatics; Stances; Attitudes 1. Introduction 1.1. Ritual in intercultural contact The present study aims to explore how interpersonal ritual notions -- and, consequently, the practices these notions cover -- are appropriated in intercultural contact. Ritual, in our interaction-based second-order understanding (Kádár, 2013), is a recurrent action which re-enacts the ideologies of a relational network or broader social group as a performance. As rituals embody and re-enact the beliefs of a society/social group (Schechner, 1993), their adoption by a new society represents intercultural appropriation. 1 This inquiry fills an important knowledge gap in pragmatics. Due to Goffman’s (1967) seminal study, rituals have received attention in pragmatics and interaction studies (for an overview see Bax, 2010; Kádár, 2013), as well as in other areas such as history (e.g. Muir, 2005), sociology (e.g. Bell, 1997), and anthropology (e.g. Turner, 1969). However, rituals have been relatively ignored in intercultural pragmatics. This is surprising, if one considers that works which count as the www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 77 (2015) 41--55 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1484 2910. 1 Appropriating indicates that an interactional practice/form is not necessarily indigenous to the culture in question but that is nonetheless used, albeit in a different way. Following Rogers’ (2006) framework of appropriation, it could be argued that the appropriation studied in this paper can either represent ‘exchange’ or ‘transculturation’, or both; studying this issue is beyond the scope of this paper and it will be examined a forthcoming project. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.12.011 0378-2166/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.