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Unsolicited advice in mediatised Chinese New Year celebrations

An interaction ritual approach

 | Dalian University of Foreign Languages
 | Dalian University of Foreign Languages | ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics | University of Maribor
 | ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics | University of Hamburg | Hellenic American University
 | Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Published online: 19 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.25052.shi
Abstract
This study investigates advice-giving during Chinese New Year family celebrations when older relatives tend to provide unsolicited advice for younger family members. First, we consider New Year advice featured in social media recordings through the lens of interaction ritual, using a corpus of TikTok videos. Second, we investigate how older and younger evaluators assess behaviours in such mediatised events. We found that the behaviour of older family members has typical ritual features: it is conventionalised in a frame, it unfolds according to conventionalised topics, it triggers self-display and it  enhances rapport between older participants. This analysis has also shown that young participants never explicitly accept the advice of their elders. The results of the second step showed that all evaluators assessed the behaviour of older participants as acceptable. However, when it comes to the behaviour of younger participants, older evaluators mostly found it unacceptable, whereas young evaluators endorsed it.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of literature
  • 3.Methodology and data
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2Data
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1First step: Main analysis
      • 4.1.1Ritual feature 1: Presence of a frame
      • 4.1.2Ritual feature 2: Conventionalised topics
      • 4.1.3Ritual feature 3: Self-display
      • 4.1.4Ritual feature 4: Enhancing rapport between older-generation participants
      • 4.1.5Behaviour of the younger participants
    • 4.2Second step: Ancillary analysis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (41)
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