Keynote Speakers

Professor Xinren Chen is currently director of Institute of Foreign Linguistics and vice director of the China Center for Linguistic Strategic Studies at Nanjing University. His major research interests include pragmatics, L2 pragmatic acquisition, and language policy and language planning. He is author of The Pragmatics of Interactional Overinformativeness (2004), Critical Pragmatic Studies of Chinese Public Discourse (2013, 2020), and Pragmatic Identity: How to Do Things with Words of Identity (2018). He has coauthored numerous books such as Contemporary Pragmatics (2004), English Grammar in Use (2004), Foreign Language Education and National Identity in the Context of Globalization (2008), The Use and Nativization of English in the Chinese Context (2012), Politeness Theories and Foreign Language Learning (2013), Pragmatics and Foreign Language Teaching (2013), Psycho-Pragmatic Analyses of Public Discourse (2013), Linguistic Memetics: Theory and Application (2014), Language Planning and Security in the Context of Globalization (2015), and Politeness Across Chinese Genres (2017). Now he is president of China Pragmatics Association (CPrA), and vice president of China Association for Discourse Studies (CADS) and China English Language Education Association (CELEA). He is (co-)editor of Studies in Linguistics and Literature, East Asian Pragmatics and Studies in Pragmatics.

Keynote Speech: The performance and relational role of toast intervention in Chinese dining contexts

Abstract

The talk aims to report an empirical study that explores the performance and relational role of toast intervention in Chinese dining contexts. The analysis of interactional data and post-event interview data indicates that moral identification may outweigh power relationship and social distance in the interactional practice, leading to constructive effects on the relationship between the intervener and the intervenee even in apparently conflictive situations. As a complement to the previous research on ritual communication such as countering the heckler and bystander intervention which focus on genuine aggression, the present study sheds light on the ritual act of toast intervention as a form of “mock moral aggression,” revealing the relatively greater weightiness of moral identification as opposed to other contextual factors and its role in explaining the relational consequences of toast intervention in Chinese dining contexts.