A Study Of The Third Party’s Receptive Response To Jocular Mockery From Rapport-Management Perspective

As a typical type of mock impoliteness,jocular mockery refers to the offensive verbal behavior carried out by interlocutors driven by the non-serious intention.Given the numerous studies of politeness and impoliteness,there are an ever-growing number of studies on jocular mockery.However,these studies mostly focus on the definition and characteristics of jocular mockery,and the relationship between jocular mockery and(im)politeness,cultural differences or identity construction.What’s more,these studies are mostly carried out from the perspective of two-party communication,which pay little attention to the third party’s response to jocular mockery.Therefore,the present study analyzes the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery with the purpose of supplying useful references for the recognition and implementation of receptive response to jocular mockery in daily communication.Within the theoretical framework of Rapport Management Theory,the present study focuses on the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery,that is,the response used by the third party to comply with the jocular intention of the initiator of jocular mockery to find out its linguistic realizations,factors that influence the choice of the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery,and pragmatic functions delivered by the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery from the perspective of face management and sociality rights management.The present study chooses the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery in the domestic reality show Back to Field as the research object and adopts the qualitative analysis method to conduct this study.In addition,the present study selects the related data based on the definition of jocular mockery put forward by Haugh,which is adopted as a criterion for the selection,and then the present study conducts the detailed analysis of the target discourses which are selected based on the uniform standard.Firstly,the present study shows that the linguistic realizations of the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery in Back to Field can be divided into five patterns: upgradation,degradation,unexpected dropping,lining with and dropping,and inversion.Secondly,the present study finds out that factors such as rapport enhancement orientation,participant relations and communicative activity can influence the choice of the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery.Last but not least,the present study maintains that receptive response to jocular mockery used by the third party performs the pragmatic function of preserving the recipient’s face and sociality rights.Based on Rapport Management Theory,the present study selects the discourses in Back to Field to explore the third party’s receptive response to jocular mockery so as to help people get a better understanding of receptive response to jocular mockery in daily communication and also provide references for related researches about mock impoliteness.