Phatic Talk and Banter

6 Key excerpts on "Phatic Talk and Banter"

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  Small Talk

  • Justine Coupland(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Malinowski was interested in small talk as discourse operating in a limited domain, dislocated from practical action and from what he thought of as 'purposive activities' (which included hunting, tilling soil and enacting war in 'primitive' societies). Nevertheless he did recognise phatic talk to be a form of action, serving 'to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship' (p. 151). Even though it may 'not serve any purpose of communicating ideas', phatic communion, for Malinowski, is functional in defusing the threat of taciturnity (p. 150). We infer that phatic talk is space-filling talk, a minimalist fulfilment of a basic communicative requirement.

  There are no illustrative examples of any detail in the original treatment, although Malinowski notes there is a preference for affirmation and consent in phatic talk, perhaps mixed with an incidental disagreement which creates the 'bonds of antipathy' (p. 150). These oblique remarks begin to suggest some strategic uses of small talk. He implies that achieving social bonding through phatic talk may be reflexive on the part of small talkers. In the same vein, he hints at listeners operating strategically behind the veneer of small talk. He gives us the image of speakers offering personal accounts of their views and life histories, to which, he says, 'hearers listen under some restraint and with slightly veiled impatience, waiting for their own turn to speak'. He continues:

  But though the hearing given to such utterances is as a rule not as intense as the speaker's own share, it is quite essential for his pleasure ... (pp. 150/1)

  For Malinowski, phatic communion is therefore 'talking small' in the further sense that it is potentially communicatively suspect or at least dissimulative (see also Sacks 1975). Malinowski certainly felt there was a fundamental indirectness in phatic exchanges:

  Are words in phatic communion used primarily to convey meaning, the meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not! ... A mere phrase of politeness ... fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. Inquiries about health, comments on the weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things - all such are exchanged, not in order to inform, not in this case to connect people to action, certainly not in order to express any thought.

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  Language and Identity

  National, Ethnic, Religious

  • J. Joseph(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This is the phatic function of language. Familiar examples include the ‘small talk’ we make with strangers and new acquaintances, the classic example being remarks about the weather. A mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing room, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. Enquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things – all such are exchanged, not in order to inform, not in this case to connect people in action, certainly not in order to express any thought. It would be even incorrect, I think, to say that such 18 Language and Identity words serve the purpose of establishing a common sentiment [ . . . ]. What is the raison d’etre [sic], therefore, of such phrases as ‘How do you do?’ ‘Ah, here you are,’ ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Nice day to-day’ – all of which serve in one society or another as formulæ of greeting or approach? (Malinowski, 1923, pp. 476–7) He proposed the term phatic communion for such utterances, defining it as ‘a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’ (ibid., p. 478). Although he says it is as much a part of the speech of civilised people as ‘savages’, he believed that phatic communion constitutes the original, primitive form of human language. His claim that ‘in pure sociabilities and gossip we use language exactly as savages do’ (ibid., p. 479) came as a surprise to readers of the time. Even those for whom it held the modernist appeal of a return to the primitive might have been more likely to accept the notion that ‘The binding tissue of words which unites the crew of a ship in bad weather, the verbal concomitants of a company of soldiers in action [ ...] resemble essentially the primitive uses of speech by man in action’ (ibid.).

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  Organization of Behavior in Face-to-Face Interaction

  • Adam Kendon, Richard M. Harris, Mary R. Key, Adam Kendon, Richard M. Harris, Mary R. Key(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  When a person speaks, he reveals often very detailed in-dexical information about his personal characteristics of regional origin, social status, personality, age, sex, state of health, mood, and a good deal more (Abercombie 1967: 7-9; Laver 1968; Laver and Hutcheson 1972: 11-14). As listeners, we infer this information from phonetic features such as voice quality, voice-dynamic features such as control of pitch, loudness and tempo, and from accent, as well as to some extent from features of linguistic choices made by the speaker. So that, just the fact of speaking and of allowing the other participant to hear the sound of one's voice, regardless of the actual linguistic content of the utterance, provides the listener with some of the information he needs to reach some initial con-clusions about the psychosocial structuring of the interaction. Between participants who are already acquainted, the exploratory function men-tioned here serves to reconfirm previous information, and between strangers serves as an initial identification. Thirdly, as will be evident from earlier comments, phatic communion has an initiatory function, in that it allows the participants to cooperate in getting the interaction comfortably under way, using emotionally uncontroversial communicative material, and demonstrating by signals of cordiality and tentative social solidarity their mutual acceptance of the possibility of an interaction taking place. The linguistic tokens used in phatic communion are highly conven-tional, and as listeners we can therefore nearly always tell when a speaker is engaging in phatic communion. Many writers have maintained that not only are the linguistic tokens selected from a finite, small set of possible utterances, but also that the referential content of the particular utterance is irrelevant to the nature of the interaction.

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  Understanding Pragmatics

  • Gunter Senft(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the same volume, John Laver points out that the ‘linguistic behavior of conversational routines, including greetings and partings, as well as please, thanks, excuses, apologies and small talk, is part of the linguistic repertoire of politeness’ (Laver 1981: 290). Discussing utterances of phatic communion, he finds that besides the two social functions already mentioned by Malinowski – that is to ‘defuse the potential hostility of silence’ and to allow participants in a social verbal encounter ‘to cooperate in getting the interaction comfortably under way’ – these linguistic routines also have a third and probably more important function in the initial phase of conversation: ‘phatic communion … allows the participants to feel their way towards the working consensus of their interaction … partly revealing their perception and their relative social status’ (Laver 1981: 301).

  In an earlier, and most important paper for the discussion of Malinowski’s concept, Laver (1975: 217) elaborates on all ‘communicative functions of phatic communion’ in detail – based on data from English-speaking cultures. In this paper, he first points out that ‘the fundamental function of the … communicative behavior that accompanies and includes phatic communion is the detailed management of interpersonal relationships during the psychologically crucial margins of interactions’. This communicative behaviour includes ‘posture, body orientations, gesture, facial expression and eye contacts’ and is more than ‘a mere exchange of words’ as Malinowski described it (Laver 1975: 232). Laver then describes and analyses the functions of utterances and other communicative forms of behaviour that are claimed to represent phatic communion in the opening and closing phases of interaction, especially with respect to the transition phases from ‘noninteraction to full interaction’ – in which phatic communion establishes contact between the interactants – and from ‘interaction back to noninteraction’ – in which phatic communion achieves a cooperative parting and helps secure the established bonds between the interactants (Laver 1975: 232).6

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  Handbook of Interpersonal Communication

  • Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  First, he (re-)introduces the no-tion phatic function of language into semiotics. Second, he – like Bühler before him – points out that not all language use realizes all these functions equally, at the same time to the same extent. Rather he suggests that different linguistic genres are defined by which one(s) of the functions is (are) realized by speakers or writers. The relevance of this conceptual framework for identifying socializing as an interactional genre most prototypical of everyday communication is revealed in the following quote: There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue com-munication, to check whether the channel works (“Hello, do you hear me?”), to at-tract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (“Are you listening?” or in Shakespearean diction, “Lend me your ears!” – and on the other end of the wire “Um-hum!”). This set for CONTACT, or in Malinowski’s terms PHATIC function […], may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication. […] (Jakobson 1960: 355). By focusing on the phatic semiotic function, Jakobson draws attention to the fact that language use is mostly communicative language use and that communi-cation is not possible unless there is contact established between the partici-pants. Interactive language use necessarily serves this function to some degree or other. Hence, small talk or socializing can be conceived as a genre of inter-action in which the phatic function is the one that motivates the exchange in the first place, but this function is also present in communications of other types.

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  How to Rethink Human Behavior

  A Practical Guide to Social Contextual Analysis

  • Bernard Guerin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Formal conversation usually has lots of: politeness, standard topics of conversation, little self-disclosure, little that requires the listener knowing your contexts, correct use of grammar and syntax, and deference to the other. These all vary hugely, of course, and groups will have different ways to do these. And beyond these vague generalizations, there are no universals.

  A lot of this talk seems superficial and pointless, and is sometimes even called ‘small talk’ in English. Such talk was called ‘phatic communion’ by Malinowski (1923) and it probably serves several functions, albeit indirect (see Coupland, Coupland and Robinson, 1992, for a good review). Coupland and Ylänne (2006), for example, recorded the conversation of a woman buying an airline ticket and the ‘chatter’ between her and the travel agent. In general, you might think of having an appointment with a doctor and the sorts of talking that go on: formal, polite, limited topics of conversation, ritualistic in some ways. This is all very much like the strategies in Chapter 3 for relationships with strangers, but we did not emphasize the language uses then, just the general behaviour characteristics. The topics of conversation are usually ones that are safe and which do not risk resources, and ones that can be discussed without knowing much context of the other person. Topics that are context free in this way include aspects of health, news of interest, the weather and things around you that both can see.

  Maynard and Zimmerman (1984) found examples of such talk when they asked students to take part in an experiment but had them wait outside for a time while being recorded. They wanted to record what was talked about. In general, the students talked about ‘topical talk’ and ‘local talk’. Local talk was about things there in the room where they were waiting, while topical talk in this case consisted mostly of talking about the courses they were doing at university and what they knew about the experiment they were to take part in.

  Informal conversation

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