Offering food and alcohol in Chinese and English: a contrastive pragmatic perspective

Abstract In this paper, we compare conventions of offering food and alcohol in Chinese and English. We define offering as an interaction ritual because in many linguacultures, food and drink are offered by following certain conventions, the observing of which is a ritually sacred duty for the host. Foreign residents in China are often irritated by Chinese conventions of offering food and drink. We try to explain such irritations by investigating how Chinese and ‘Western’ offering conventions differ from one another. Our framework brings together speech acts and interaction ritual theory. We first present relevant experiences of English-speaking foreigners living in China. We then conduct a contrastive pragmatic study of English and Chinese food and alcohol offering conventions, followed by an interpretation of the irritations reported by our panel of foreigners through our contrastive outcomes.