5.1 Introduction
This chapter explores the phenomenon of mimesis from a pragmatic point of view. All interaction rituals are mimetic. The chapter will devote specific attention to an understudied, albeit important type of mimesis, namely ‘performative mimesis’, which differs from its more broadly studied ‘interpersonal’ counterpart and which typically occurs in complex and longer stretches of interaction ritual. The concept of ‘performative mimesis’ refers to contrived interactional performance whereby the performer sustains mimicking a predated interactional schema, just like an actor in a theatre manages a performance on stage by enacting a role. This notion of performative mimesis originates in the following Reference GoffmanGoffmanian (1959: 17) idea:
When an individual plays a part, he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.
The difference between performative mimesis and interpersonal mimesis can be described as follows. Interpersonal mimesis always occurs in ordinary conversation where it implies ritual ‘reciprocation’ (Reference Edmondson and HouseEdmondson & House 1981: 204). Interpersonal mimesis is particularly likely to occur in the ritual phases of Opening and Closing Talk (see Reference House and KádárHouse & Kádár 2021a; see also Chapter 11), and also in conventionalised ritual exchanges (see Reference IdeIde 1998), including religious ceremonies where reciprocation may not necessarily imply that the participants say exactly the same things. The following is a typical interactional example of reciprocation:
A: Hello John
B: Gosh, hello, Mary. Haven’t seen you in ages – how are you?
A: Oh, I am fine, thanks. How’s life been treating you then?
B: Oh, not too bad, you know.
Interpersonal mimesis not only covers mimicking each other in such conversational routines. Rather, a sense of participant ‘convergence’ also occurs in daily conversations when a specific subject or practice recurs between the participants, as in a recurring complaint or an ongoing joke. For instance, Reference Donald, Hatfield and PittmanDonald (2013: 189) referred to reciprocal mimetic games in the following terms: ‘Someone invents a move; the next one imitates it, and perhaps adds something new, and so on.’1 In summary, interpersonal mimesis represents an important but relatively simple type of mimesis, encompassing both ‘meaningful’ and ‘meaningless’ ritual behaviour in the literal sense.
As opposed to interpersonal mimesis, performative mimesis implies re-enactment but not reciprocation, in that the recipient of this form of mimesis is not supposed to reciprocate in kind. Furthermore, this type of mimesis is not limited to certain phases of an interaction but rather tends to be present over entire interaction ritual events, which are ritual in the more abstract sense. Performative mimesis is different from ‘crossing’, which was discussed previously in this book. Crossing ‘involves a distinct sense of movement across social or ethnic boundaries and it raises issues of legitimacy which, in one way or another, participants need to negotiate in the course of their encounter’ (Reference RamptonRampton 1995: 485). The operation of performative mimesis does not necessarily entail social or ethnic differences, and also this form of mimesis, unlike crossing, can become normative in certain institutional ritual settings, and as such it is not an ephemeral part of an interaction.
Figure 5.1 – which is an adaptation of Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2 – illustrates the relationship between interpersonal and performative mimesis:
Figure 5.1 Interpersonal versus performative mimesis.
The double-headed arrow which was featured in previous versions of this figure occurs in an altered form in Figure 5.1, in order to illustrate that interpersonal and performative mimesis differ from each other in a tendential way. That is, interpersonal mimesis is arguably frequented in ritual behaviour which one normally interprets through forms, e.g., exchanges of speech acts (see e.g., a How-are-You → How-are-You exchange). Performative mimesis, on the other hand, can be observed in complex rituals where ritual can be approached as a context or a cluster of contexts, such as the MMA event studied in Chapter 3.2
As its name suggests, performative mimesis represents a ritual ‘performance’. More specifically, in Goffman’s terminology, performative mimesis involves a ‘contrived [ritual] performance’ (Reference GoffmanGoffman 1959: 70), consistently mimicking a perceived or ‘scripted’ form of pre-existing behaviour, which counts as conventionalised and normative in a particular context. Liminal ritual events (see Chapter 3) and liminoid theatre performances (Reference TurnerTurner 1979) are the most representative scenarios in which performative mimesis occurs. In such scenarios, the participants’ normal status and related behaviour are changed, and this change triggers performative mimesis.
In order to investigate performative mimesis in interaction, as a case study the current chapter examines aggressive mimetic behaviour in Chinese university ‘military trainings’ (junxun 军训), by focusing on the recurrent expressions and speech acts that recur in such events. ‘Military training’ refers to a university course, during which first-year students in Chinese institutions of higher education receive physical training from ‘officers’ (jiaoguan 教官) who are usually second- or third-year students. While in both real army trainings and university trainings the participants receive hard physical training, in university military classes the participants do not receive any proper martial education, and also usually none of the participants is a real army person. Due to the fact that army language is conventionally aggressive, i.e., aggression in such language is conventionalised and normative, in the case study of this chapter I devote particular attention to how aggression plays out in ritual performative mimesis.
The goal of examining this case study is to identify langue-based evidence for the social operation of the important and understudied performatory type of the cognitive process involved in mimesis. As was mentioned in Chapter 2, various key ritual notions such as mimesis are relatively rarely used in mainstream pragmatic research, and so it is important to attempt to pin them down through strictly language-anchored inquiries. From the pragmatician’s point of view, the cognitive process of performative mimesis can be most reliably captured if we examine recurrent ritual pragmatic behaviour in naturally occurring interactions, where the interactants deliberately re-enact (see Reference Bax, Culpeper and KádárBax 2010) language use that does not naturally ‘belong’ to them. In this respect, it is particularly helpful to explore settings such as Chinese university military trainings, in which the participants make attempts to re-enact a ritual which, by default, is part of another institutional setting – in the present case, a scenario orchestrated by a real army officer. This ritual re-enactment process comes to life in university military training when student ‘officers’ attempt to talk as army personnel as part of the anti-structural rite of passage of the training, although of course after the training sessions they and the trainees both need to relapse into their ordinary lives (i.e., the ‘structure’) as students.
The structure of this chapter is the following. Section 5.2 introduces the case study in more detail, also including the methodology and data of the case-study analysis. Section 5.3 presents the case-study analysis. Finally, Section 5.4 provides a conclusion.
5.2 Case Study: Chinese University Military Training Courses
When I first observed university military training as an academic working in China, I felt stricken by the ritual nature of such events. These quasi-military trainings operate in a ritual frame with strictly defined temporary rights and obligations and exhibit recurrent pragmatic features. They also have a complex participatory structure: they take place in the sports field (caochang 操场) of universities, and the participants include trainers, students and official delegates of the university occasionally observing the events, as well as many eavesdroppers passing by and/or using the sports field simultaneously. Further – importantly for this chapter – such university military trainings trigger performative mimesis because the student ‘officers’ need – and are expected – to ratify (Reference GoffmanGoffman 1967) their role as quasi-representatives of the army by mimicking military language, hence leaving the boundaries of their ‘normal’ lives.
Clearly, Chinese university military trainings are archetypical anti-structural rites of passage: they are liminal events that transform the status of the participants. By going through a military training, first-year new arrivals at a university are transformed into ‘proper’ members of the community of a Chinese university. The trainings are centred on a military ethos: the students not only need to go through the physical exercises, but they are also required to participate in emotionally loaded communal activities such as singing and chanting. An important incentive for the students to cope with this compulsory rite of passage is that military trainings are conventionally regarded as sources of long-term friendships between the participating students.
University military trainings were originally more ‘authentic’ than they are at present, in that while this ritual always mimicked real army training sessions, it used to be held by actual army officers until 1999. In that year, Chinese universities significantly increased their student intake and the number of Chinese army specialist trainers proved to be insufficient to cope with this sudden expansion. Subsequently, Chinese universities gradually replaced army people with student-trainers and decreased the length and intensity of military training courses. Currently, military training is a compulsory course, usually without credit. Thus, Chinese university military trainings have increasingly evolved into a performative mimetic ritual process over the years.
5.2.1 Methodology
In this case-study analysis, I pursue a strictly language-anchored approach, in order to attempt integrating mimesis in the mainstream of pragmatic research. Engaging in performative mimesis implies that the trainers realise expressions and speech acts in ways which would be sanctioned in ordinary circumstances. These expressions and speech acts indicate, and raise awareness of, the mimicked army setting in which the trainers have specific rights and obligations as quasi-army ‘representatives’. This quasi-character needs to be emphasised consistently, considering that the student trainers’ rights only last as long as they are on the training grounds. The question of course emerges how student trainers can manage this mimesis, considering that those who act as trainers at universities are likely to have never been inside an army because there is no general conscription in China. An answer to this question resides in the historicity (see Reference Kádár, Culpeper, Culpeper and KádárKádár & Culpeper 2010) of university military trainings in Chinese universities: as the course used to be held by army people, student trainers are likely to have ‘inherited’ the conventionalised pragmatic inventory of these ritual events as part of an ‘institutionalised tradition’ (Reference VolkovVolkov 1991). The institutionalised ritual frame of the aggression implies that the participants are provided with rights and obligations not normally holding for their lives, and this is why the pragmatic behaviour of trainers makes sense only in the particular inherited institutional setting of trainings: a fellow student who is cast in the role of the trainer has the right to be ‘aggressive’ only on the training ground. While ritual aggression in general has a sense of ‘temporariness’ in that it can only unfold unsanctioned while the ritual itself is ongoing, university military trainings are different from other forms of aggressive institutional ritual such as forms of political and courtroom aggression in that the role of the trainer who is endowed with the right to be aggressive is not permanent – unlike, for example, that of a judge.
The methodology of this case study is based on the assumption that certain expressions and speech acts are constitutive of a situation that is standard and normative for the participants. The notion of ‘standard situation’ was mentioned on several occasions in this book, and it was originally proposed by Reference House, Blum-Kulka, House and KasperHouse (1989: 115) who argues, in the context where a Request is realised by means of an expression, as follows:
The notion of a standard situation involves participants’ rather fixed expectations and perceptions of social role. Role relations are transparent and predetermined, the requester has a right, the requestee an obligation, the degree of imposition involved in the request is low, as is the perceived degree of difficulty in realizing it. In a nutshell, the participants know where and who they are. Clearly, the distinction between a standard and a nonstandard situation is not clear-cut.
It is clear that university military trainings are highly standardised for the participants. In 1985, the revised version of the Military Service Law of the People’s Republic of China stipulated that high school students are also required to take part in such courses, and that middle and primary schools should also organise so-called ‘defense education’ courses (see Reference He and ShengHe & Sheng 2014). Thus, practically all Chinese students have already experienced military trainings before entering the university system, and so they are likely to have both pragmatic experience and expectations regarding the dynamics of this university course.
To a certain degree ‘standardness’ is a relative value, in that it represents a scalar value in Reference LeechLeech’s (1983) sense. However, what interconnects all standard situations is that the rights and obligations holding for the participants is immediately clear to those who are familiar with such standard situations, without detailed contextual information. Due to the prevalence of rights and obligations in standard situations such as military trainings, such situations may be best interpreted as ritual in the abstract contextual sense (see Figure 5.1). Expressions used in such situations indicate the participants’ awareness of the standard situation and broader ritual frame in a particular context – in other words, these expressions can be described as Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs).
I will discuss the concept of RFIEs, which I developed with Juliane House, in more detail in Part III of the present book. What is important to mention at this point is that RFIEs have an intrinsic relationship with speech acts. In some linguacultures such as Chinese, RFIEs are particularly ‘speech-act anchored’, i.e., they often indicate the realisation of a certain speech act. As part of the methodology of this case-study analysis, I will therefore not only examine various RFIEs by means of which the trainers mimic real-life army trainings, but I will also analyse speech acts – indicated by these RFIEs – that characterise these training sessions. It is important to note that, as we argued in Reference House and KádárHouse and Kádár (2021a), an RFIE can become the Head Act of a speech act such as Request.
As the case-study analysis will show, as part of performative mimesis student trainers recurrently realise very direct Requests (‘Request (to-do-x/not-to-do-x); see Reference Edmondson and HouseEdmondson & House (1981: 97), displaying the requestive strategy ‘mood derivable’ (see Reference Blum-Kulka, House and KasperBlum-Kulka et al. (1989: 278). Directness refers to the degree to which the speaker’s illocutionary intent is apparent from the locution. The category ‘mood derivable’ refers to the employment of phenomena such as raw imperatives (e.g., ‘Go away’). It is clear that the very direct mood derivable Request is constitutive of real-life military trainings, and the fact that it is typical of the university course under investigation is evidence of the importance of performative mimesis in this setting.
The methodology of the case study is qualitative in nature, i.e., a team of colleagues and myself examined recurrent RFIEs and speech acts in the data without quantifying them. While it would have been highly productive to combine this approach with a quantitative examination, the circumstances of the data collection prevented doing this.
Similarly to what has been argued elsewhere in this book, the concept of ritual frame that underlies communal behaviour beyond the dyadic level prompts one to look at aggression in the data beyond the politeness (and impoliteness) paradigm. In this setting, aggression may manifest itself in expressions and speech acts that appear to be ‘impolite’ or ‘rude’ in an interpersonal sense; however, in our case their primary function is not to cause offence (see e.g., Reference CulpeperCulpeper 2011) but rather to reinforce rights and obligations and the related ritual frame of the interaction, beyond the scope of strict-sense interpersonal impoliteness. While the trainers may sometimes overstep their roles and speak particularly harshly, by default it is not only their right but also their institutional normative obligation to appear to be aggressive. This obligation is particularly important in contexts like the one studied in this chapter in which mimetic behaviour is prevalent: simply put, the trainers need to be (and are expected to be) aggressive to resolve the potential ambiguity caused by the fact that they are ‘step ins’ for real army personnel. In the analysis of aggression in the data studied in this chapter, the team of researchers with whom I worked on the data collection devoted particular attention to the prosodic features of how trainers talk, considering that army language tends to be associated with specific prosodic features such as vowel lengthening.
5.2.2 Data
This case study is based on a corpus of university military trainings, which was collected at a university in the northeast of China in September 2019, during the annual army training session of the university. Before starting the data collection, the students who helped me collect this corpus first asked the university’s permission to audio-record the training sessions. As part of this procedure, they only requested the consent of the trainers because our team did not transcribe or use anything that the trainees uttered during the events, nor did we reveal the personal details of any participant. This was mainly due to technical reasons: the students’ utterances were barely audible during the extremely loud training sessions. In addition, asking the consent of all the trainees would have been disruptive for the training course.
The participants in the recorded data included four volunteer instructors: two female and two male students. These instructors trained two groups, with each group consisting of 120 first-year students, being led by both a male and a female trainer. The whole-day training sessions lasted for a period of two weeks, which is standard for university military trainings in China. I requested each of the trainers to attach MP4 audio-recorders onto their uniform and keep the recording running during all the sessions. Overall, the audio-recorded corpus consists of nearly ten hours of interaction. The relatively low amount of recording can be explained by the fact that during the training sessions verbal interaction only represents a minor proportion of the entire training, and also that a large proportion of the recorded speech turned out to be inaudible. Following the training course, my students transcribed the utterances of the trainers, by using conversation-analytic conventions. In accordance with these conventions, the examples below feature both Chinese characters and the Pinyin Romanisation of these characters.
5.3 Analysis
In this analysis, I first investigate the use of RFIEs in the corpus and following this I analyse recurrent speech acts mimicking real-life army trainings. In a sense, this is an ‘artificial’ division because RFIEs often indicate speech acts, i.e., RFIEs and speech acts are only distinguished in the present analysis as different units of analysis rather than different phenomena.
5.3.1 Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions
Ritual frame indicating expressions used by student trainers in the present corpus can be divided into two major groups: (1) expressions which are directly ‘borrowed’ from army language, and (2) other expressions which gain an army-like function in the particular standard situation of university military trainings.
The first group of RFIEs, directly borrowed from army language, are compulsory in particular moves of the army trainers. Some others do not represent army language per se but sound aggressively ‘army-like’ in the standard situation of university military trainings. Example 5.1 represents the use of RFIEs belonging to the former category:
齐步走! 立定 !
Qi: bu::: (…) ↑ z::ou ! Li:: ding!
↑ March::: (…) ! Sto::p!
Here the trainer uses the RFIEs qibuzou 齐步走 (‘march’) and liding 立定 (‘stop’). These RFIEs are typical elements of real army language, and it is not surprising that they prevail in the corpus of the present case study. As the transcript of Example 5.1 indicates, the aggressive prosody of these RFIEs mimics that of proper army trainings,3 in particular the rising intonation, primary stress and lengthened syllables are conventional prosodic features that army trainers frequent in many linguacultures as they bark their orders.
A similar ‘borrowed’ RFIE in our corpus is douyou 都有 (‘attention’), the use of which illustrated by Example 5.2:
全体都有,向右转。
Quan t:i dou y::ou, xiang y:::ou zhuan.
Everybody, ate::ntion! Tur:::n left.
Similar to the RFIEs qibuzou and liding in Example 5.1, the RFIE douyou in Example 5.2 – uttered with lengthened syllables – represents conventional army language.
The second category of RFIEs in the present corpus consists of various expressions which do not represent military language as such, but rather indicate the standard situation of university military training, in which they mimetically re-enact the aggressive language use associated with the army. The most typical RFIE by means of which this mimetic re-enactment is performed is the second-person T pronoun ni 你. The Chinese language distinguishes between this T form and its V counterpart nin 您 (see a detailed pragmatic analysis in Reference 238KádárHouse & Kádár 2020). The T form ni is practically always used between Chinese university students in ordinary interactions. However, in the corpus of this case study this T form typically occurs in a sentence-final position and it is uttered in a saliently lengthened way, as the following examples show:
你们两个特别低,你!
Ni men liang ge te bie di, n::i!
You both kick your legs too low. Y::ou!
腿抬高!立定!怎么回事你?累了吗你?
Tui ↑ tai g:::ao! L:::i ding! Zen me hui shi n::i? Lei le ma n::i?
Legs ↑ u:::p! Sto:::p! What’s the matter with y::ou? Are you tired, y::ou?
In Example 5.3, ni transforms into an RFIE, indicating a very direct speech act Request and the related right of the trainer to intimidate his trainees ‘for their own good’, as well as the obligation of the trainees to comply with the direct Request. In Example 5.4, ni occurs twice, following the above-discussed military RFIE liding 立定 (‘stop’). Here ni is again produced in a sentence-final position, and it is uttered with a significantly lengthened syllable. In this utterance, this RFIE operates as an interactional resource for the trainer to intimidate the recipient – an underperforming first-year student – by boosting the sarcastic overtone of the utterance.
Another typical expression in the present corpus representing the second category of RFIEs is da-baogao 打报告 (‘to report to someone’). This expression can occur in many other institutional settings, such as ordinary classrooms. What makes it salient in the context of university military training sessions is its semantic and pragmatic meaning: asking for a report represents the right of a lecturer, and so in normal circumstances this form can be uttered as a Request by a higher-ranking person towards a lower-ranking recipient. Thus, in the standard situation of military training, this expression positions the trainer student as a superordinate who can give an ‘order’, i.e., realise a direct Request, and the recipient as a subordinate who must follow this ‘order’. The following example illustrates the use of this RFIE:
刚才动了的人打报告。刚才谁动了? 有多少人打报告?
Gang cai dong le de ren (..) ↓ da bao g::ao. Gang cai shui d::ong ↑ le? You duo shao ren ↓ da bao gao?
The person who moved just now makes a ↓ repo::rt to me. Who ↑ mo::ved? How many people have ↓ reported to me? (Shouting).
In Example 5.5, the RFIE da-baogao is uttered twice, which can be interpreted as an aggressive escalation of the Request, triggered by the repetition.4 Furthermore, the RFIE is recurrently uttered in a lower pitch, which increases its aggressive tone (see e.g., Reference FrickFrick 1986).
The RFIEs studied thus far are clearly anchored in the speech act Request. In the following, let us examine interactional patterns through which subcategories of this speech act are mimetically realised in the present corpus.
5.3.2 Speech Acts
The standard situation of university military training triggers a specific type of Request, namely, Requests realised in their most direct form, i.e., ‘raw imperatives’ which are often referred to as ‘mood derivable’ (see Reference Blum-Kulka, House and KasperBlum-Kulka et al. 1989). In the present study of the student trainers’ Requestive behaviour, my colleagues and myself also considered how mood derivables are modified through the use of ‘upgraders’ and ‘downgraders’ (see Reference Edmondson and HouseEdmondson & House 1981).
Mood Derivable
As we could see in Section 5.3.1, RFIEs borrowed from army language (see Examples 5.1 and 5.2) tend to occur when a particular Request is realised as mood derivable. Along with such RFIEs, there are also other lexical forms indicating raw imperatives in very direct Requests; in the present corpus, such forms typically include verbs of prohibition. The most typical of such words in Chinese university military trainings include bie 别 (‘don’t’) and buyao 不要 (‘you shouldn’t’). The following examples illustrate the use of these expressions:
别讲话!
BIE ↓ JIANG ↓ HU:::A!
DON’T ↓ TAL:::K! (shouting)
不要把步子加快。
Bu yao ba (..) bu zi (.) jia kuai.
Don’t (..) quicken (.) your pace.
Along with verbs of prohibition, there are also other conventionalised forms embedded in raw imperatives, as the following example illustrates:
后边快一点,快一点。
Hou bian (..) < kuai yi dian>,< kuai yi dian>.
People in the back (..) < hurry up>, <hurry up>.
In Example 5.8, the student trainer recurrently deploys kuai-yidian 快一点 (‘hurry up’), which is a conventionalised very direct Request in Chinese. Kuai-yidian is conventionally associated with parental language, and so it expresses here a patronising tone (see more below).
Lexical Upgrading
A typical form of lexical upgrader deployed by student trainers is buxiang 不想 (‘I don’t want’), a modal verb which occurs in Requests (not-to-to-do-x). If this verb occurs in strong prohibitive Requests, it nearly always expresses a sense of patronising impatience, as the following example shows:
这里所有人, 向后转,转体,我不想再强调了。向后转,一、二,向后转,不错。向左看齐,看齐的时候别撩头发,我最后再提醒你们一遍。
Zhe li suo you re::n, xiang ho::u zhuan, zhuan t:::i, wo bu xiang zai (..) <qiang diao l:e>. Xiang ho::u zhuan, yi, er, xiang ho::u zhuan, bu cu:::o. Xiang zuo kan ↓ qi, kan qi de shi hou (…) bie liao tou fa, wo zui hou zai ti xing ni men yi bian.
Everybo:::dy here, turn ba::ck, turn your bo:::dy, I don’t want to (..) <emphasise it again:> ((impatient)). Turn ba::ck, one, two, turn ba::ck, go:::od. Look ↓ left, don’t touch your hair (…) when you look left. I am telling you for the last time.
Another type of lexical upgrader that recurs in our corpus includes negative adjectives indicating criticism. Such adjectives typically boost the Request, by negatively positioning the requestee. The following examples illustrate the use of such adjectives:
太乱了,听我口令吧。
Tai luan le, ting wo kou ling ba.
Too disordered. Follow my order.
都踢得软绵绵的,用点力。
Dou ti de ruan mianmian de, yong dian l::i.
You all kick softly. Use more str::ength.
这样动作很丑。
Zhe yang dong zuo hen chou.
This movement is ugly.
My definition of ‘negative’ is not semantically defined but is rather based on the contextual meaning of the adjectives. For instance, in Example 5.11 the trainer scolds the students by claiming that their marching kicks are made too ‘softly’ (ruan mianmian-de 软绵绵的), which is apparently a negative evaluation in the particular context. As Examples 5.10, 5.11 and 5.12 all illustrate, prosody plays an important role in exacerbating the power of the adjectives: trainers who were recorded in the present corpus tend to put heavy primary stress on either the adjectives (Example 5.10) or their modifiers (Examples 5.11 and 5.12). In terms of mimesis, such adjectives position the student trainer as an ‘expert’: considering that the trainers only have slightly more experience than the trainees, strong evaluation provides them with a certain sense of expertise and authority (see also Reference BlackwellBlackwell 2010 on the relationship between evaluation and authority).
Yet another form of lexical upgrading includes the use of the gambit or discourse marker ‘starter’ (see Reference Edmondson and HouseEdmondson & House 1981; see also Reference House and KádárHouse & Kádár 2021a). Starters are used whenever the speaker starts his turn of talk, by alerting the hearer of the fact that the speaker is now about to say something. This gambit again positions the student trainer as an ‘expert’, considering that it is very often used in educational settings by the powerful party, i.e., typically a teacher. In terms of mimesis, in university military trainings this starter is particularly powerful, due to the fact that the trainings take place in universities where all the participants are familiar with the communicative style of teachers. In university military trainings, the most typical starter that the trainers use to introduce what they want to say is lai 来 (‘right’):
来, 所有人, 停!
L:ai (..) suo you ren, t::ing!
Ri:ght (..) everybody, sto::p.
Syntactic Upgrading
In the corpus of the present case study, syntactic upgraders most typically manifest themselves in the form of aggressive interrogative sentences boosting the Request. There are two types of such interrogatives: those that operate in the form of Request (to-do-x), and those expressing Request (not-to-do-x). The following examples illustrate the operation of the Request (to-do-x) category:
七班在最后面,八班在最中间,九班在八班后面,记住了吗?
Qi ban zai zui hou mian, ba ban zai zui zhong jian, jiu ban zai ba ban hou mian, ji zhu le m::a?
Class Seven is at the back, Class Eight is in the middle, Class Nine is at the back of Class eight, remember, ye::s?
听懂没?
Ting dong ↓ mei?
Understand ↓ don’t?
明白没?
Ming bai ↓ mei?
Get ↓ don’t you?
Examples 5.15, 5.16 and 5.17 are similar in that the interrogative particle or tag question5 that expresses the question is uttered either with extended syllables (Example 5.15), or in a lower-stressed pitch (Examples 5.16 and 5.17). Such prosodic features make the Request appear angry and aggressive, and as such they upgrade the Request. This upgrading function seemingly contradicts the default pragmatic function of questions, which consists of rendering an utterance more indirect (see Reference Blum-Kulka, House and KasperBlum-Kulka et al. 1989: 281). Notably, the instructors in the corpus regularly use tag questions in an abbreviated form: for instance, in both Examples 5.16 and 5.17 the tag question structure you-meiyou 有没有 (‘x, don’t you’) is abbreviated to the substandard form mei 没. In many other university settings, students often use such abbreviated forms when they interact with each other, and also in various Chinese dialects the use of this form is acceptable. However, in our case, the above-discussed prosodic features do not afford the recipient to interpret such expressions as ‘casual’, ‘friendly’, ‘dialectal’ and so on, but rather they reinforce the aggressive nature of the ritual frame triggered by the standard situation of university military training.
Examples 5.18, 5.19 and 5.20 illustrate the operation of aggressive interrogatives expressing Request (not-to-do-x). In the corpus of this case study, Requests (not-to-do-x) are manifested as ‘tirades’, during which the trainer attacks the undesirable behaviour of the trainees:
你们现在干嘛呐?整个草坪上就你们一列,还嬉嬉闹闹!主席台上的教官看不见吗?
Ni men xian zai gan ma ↓ n::a? Zheng ge cao ping jiu ni men yi l::ie, hai xi xi ↓ nao nao! Zhu xi tai shang de jiao guan kan bu jian ↑ m::a?((fennu))
What are you doing ↓ e::h? You are the only te::am who is ↓ sloppy and frolic on the whole lawn. Can’t the instructors on the rostrum see you ↑ e::h? (heated)
你是在这儿吗? 那后边人咋跑啊?
Ni shi zai zhe er ↑ ma? Na hou mian ren zha pao ↑ a::?
Are you here ↑ eh? How can the people behind you run ↑ e::h?
还需要我喊一二一吗? 还有三天,就汇报表演了!
Hai xu yao wo han yi er yi ↑ m:::a? Hai you san tian, jiu hui bao biao yan (.) l:::e. (fennu)
Do you need me to say one, two, one ↑ ha:::h? There are only three days left before the formal perform:::ance! (heated)
In terms of prosodic features, these aggressive interrogatives operate exactly like their Request (to-do-x) counterparts. Examples 5.18 and 5.19 illustrate a recurrent phenomenon in the corpus: student trainers tend to deploy interrogatives to ‘bombard’ the trainees with unpleasant questions (see Reference AinsworthAinsworth 1993). The only significant prosodic difference between such interrogatives and their Request (to-do-x) counterparts is that the former are often uttered in a high pitch, as Examples 5.18, 5.19 and 5.20 all illustrate. This high pitch adds a sense of ‘talking down’ to these questions and the speech act Request in a broader sense (see Reference Bryant and Fox TreeBryant & Fox Tree 2005 on high pitch as a manifestation of ‘talking down’).
Along with aggressive interrogative sentences, conditional clauses are also deployed in the corpus as syntactic upgraders, as the following example illustrates:
不行,排头就换人。
Bu x:::ing, pai t::ou (…) jiu huan ren.
[If] you ca:::n’t do well, I will let others (…) stand at the hea::d of the queue.
A noteworthy characteristic of such conditional clauses is that student trainers tend to omit the conjunction. In university military training sessions, conditional clauses regularly introduce a threat realised through the Request, as in Example 5.21.
Lexical Downgrading
Downgraders are relatively rare in the corpus, which is not surprising considering that aggression in such settings is meant to be escalated rather than downgraded. However, when these downgraders do occur, their use is paradoxical in that they do not have any mitigatory function, that is, ‘downgrading’ here does not operate in the conventional sense of the word. Rather, just as the abbreviated (not-to-do-x) interrogatives examined in the previous section, instances of downgrading in the corpus convey a sense of ‘talking down’ to the addressees. The following preposition geiwo 给我 (roughly ‘[do it] for me’) is the main lexical downgrading form in our corpus:
来,所有给我听口令。
Lai (..) suo you ren gei wo <ting wo kou li::ng>.
Right (..) everybody <listen to my passw::ord> for me.
坚持住了,后腿也给我绷直,别后仰,脚尖给我下压。
Jian chi zh:u l::e, hou tui ye gei wo beng zh::i, bie hou y:ang, jiao jian gei wo xia ↓ya.
Hold o::n, keep your back legs stra::ight for me, don’t le:an backwards, ↓ press your toes down for me.
‘Talking down’ in the case of such utterances derives from the fact that the use of the preposition geiwo adds a quasi-familial tone to the utterance. Yet, this quasi-familial tone is clearly insincere and as such decidedly patronising, considering that the ritual frame of the interaction precludes any sense of social or emotional closeness between the trainer and the trainees. In a sense, geiwo positions the trainer as a parent figure, talking down to immature children. Such forms of language use could indeed occur in parental contexts, like when a parent is trying to make a child eat (e.g., ‘eat x for me’). In terms of mimesis, it is a noteworthy fact that some trainers – like the one featured in Example 5.23 – repeat the patronising geiwo, which thus represents an attempt to talk like a senior army figure.
5.4 Conclusion
This chapter presented mimesis, by dividing it up to the two categories of performative and interpersonal mimesis. Performative mimesis, unlike interpersonal mimesis, only occurs in relatively complex interaction rituals. This is why in Figure 4.1 in Chapter 4 mimesis was featured on a par with (self-)displaying behaviour and other features of complex rituals. Yet, mimesis in some form is arguably present in any type of ritual behaviour if, for nothing else, due to the conventionalised nature of rituals.
The present chapter has examined performative mimesis in a ritual context where the performer of the ritual mimics pragmatic patterns over the course of an entire event. Such behavioural patterns may have various origins, spanning scripted texts in theatres to inherited interactional traditions (as in the present case study). Certain ritual scenarios such as university military trainings trigger performative mimesis, which fit into the Reference GoffmanGoffmanian (1959: 70) notion of contrived performances mimicking a form of behaviour that somehow predates, and is re-enacted in, the actual interaction. The pragmatic category of performative mimesis is essentially different from its interpersonal counterpart, with the latter involving reciprocation, in particular in the ritual phases of opening and closing a conversation.
When people mimic a perceived ritual frame through a contrived performance, they use certain expressions (RFIEs) as well as specific conventionalised realisations of speech acts, in order to indicate their own and other participants’ situated rights and obligations. Such RFIEs and speech acts typically indicate awareness of the standard situation and the related conventions holding for the participants, and as such they operate as reminders of the fact that little facework is necessary for all the participants. This, in turn, makes aggression normative in anti-structural ritual contexts. In the present case study of Chinese university military trainings, student trainers typically deploy RFIEs either borrowed from army language or used in a way to evoke aggression associated with army language. The trainers frequented the speech Request in particular. Requests in the trainings tend to be realised as mood derivables and in upgraded or downgraded forms. Further, while the speech act Request can be downgraded by the student trainers, paradoxically such downgrading does not imply mitigation of the Request in this particular context.
Performative mimesis implies a suspension of disbelief while the participants interact within the ritual frame. A representative pragmatic evidence for the effect of this ritual frame in which suspension of disbelief unfolds is prosody studied in this chapter, which differs in the ritual frame of university military trainings from how prosody often operates in everyday contexts. Student trainers often employ a distinctively army-like prosody, i.e. unlike in scenarios of everyday interaction they engage in performative mimesis to create an illusion, which the trainees are expected to accept due to the rights and obligations triggered by the inherited institutional tradition of university military trainings.
After describing the phenomenon of mimesis, in the next Chapter 6 we cover another phenomenon which can be observed in interactionally complex rituals: (self-)display.
