View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repository of the Academy's Library Vol 4, No. 1 - (Im)politeness in intercultural encounters - 2017 Side 1/29 This is a reviewed article The pragmatics of mimesis: A case study of intercultural email communication Liz Marsden1 & Dániel Z. Kádár2 Corresponding email:
[email protected] Keywords: mimesis mimicry ritual convention email computer-mediated communication 1 orcid.org/0000-0001-7308-1903 2 Dániel Kádár’s research has been made possible by the MTA Lendület Research Grant (LP2017-5/2017) of the Hungarian AcademyTHIS of Sciences, IS A whichREVIEWED has sponsored ARTICLE 100% of his time involvement in the present project. L. Marsden, D. Z. Kádár, The pragmatics of mimesis: A case study of intercultural email communication (Im)politeness in intercultural encounters, Vol 4 No. 1/2017 FLEKS Vol 4, No. 1 - (Im)politeness in intercultural encounters - 2017, Side 2/29 Abstract Researchers have pursued interest in how the mimetic practice types of convention and ritual influence the ways in which people build up and maintain interpersonal relationships. Arguably, mimetic interactional acts that animate conventional and ritual practices are key to capturing fundamental aspects of interpersonal phenomena such as politeness, impoliteness, and humour, since language users tend to produce and interpret interpersonal behaviour through normative and repetitive moves, which may develop into routines. Despite the importance of mimetic acts in language use, little research has been done on mimesis itself in the realm of interpersonal pragmatics even though memes themselves have received attention.