Teasing as a practice of managing delicate issues in institutional talk

Abstract

This article takes the practice of teasing in institutional talk as its focus and examines a Mandarin Chinese case of request from a conversation analytic perspective. It turns out that teasing can effectively perform the tasks of social control and tension management in institutional interactions. With detailed analyses of the mechanisms that can be employed to resolve delicate issues in institutional contexts, it is proposed that teasing as a social action can enable conversational participants to express and tackle the underlying conflicts or problems in institutional encounters. The present research also probes into the tacit manoeuvring of the teaser and the tease recipient’s identities or category memberships achieved or built up by minor transgressions, deviant claims, deontic assertions, and (dis)affiliation displays. This study contributes to the understanding of dynamic identity construction in social encounters and overall tension management in institutional contexts as well.