User:Celer2017/Phatics

This page is about Phatics. For other uses, see Phatic expression and Small talk.

This page represents work in progress on a Wikipedia article and an accompanying paper. Highlighted text will appear in the paper, not the encyclopedia.

A visual illustration of phatic communion (conversation around a campfire), phatic communication (between a mother and a child), and phatic function (telephone inter-locution).

In anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics, "phatic" describes varied notions of communication for the sake of communication, beginning with Bronisław Malinowski's definition of phatic communion as free, aimless, social intercourse. The anthropologist Weston La Barre subsequently created a theory of phatic communication, and the linguist Roman Jakobson introduced a phatic function as one of his six language functions. The term is also used in more recent neologistic compounds like phatic technologies, phatic media culture, and phatic infrastructure.

Although the three main progenitors of research into "phatics" use the same core term, they approach their subject matters with very different goals in mind. Malinowski was elaborating an anthropological theory of meaning, essentially negating the referential, emotive, and conative functions of primitive speech. La Barre re-evaluated primatological and linguistic facts about human communication and attributed emotive and conative dimensions to phatic communication. Roman Jakobson elaborated Karl Bühler's organon model and added three metafunctions (poetic, metalingual, and phatic) to his own scheme.

Textual foundations

In 1923 Malinowski described the speech habits of the Trobriand Island inhabitants and thought that he had discovered a new type of linguistic use, "a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words", for which he invented the term phatic communion. This work was published as a "supplement" to Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards's The Meaning of Meaning.

In 1954, the anthropologist Weston La Barre treated aspects of vocal communication, i.e. speech and animal communication, in terms of phatic communication in his book The Human Animal, before the now-popular terms paralanguage and nonverbal communication were accepted by a slow academic consensus.

The most influential development came from the linguist Roman Jakobson, who wrote a single paragraph - in a manuscript first presented in 1956 and published in 1960 - about the phatic function of speech, which foregrounds the relation between the speakers, such as asking the listener whether s/he is still listening, etc. which he modelled after the theory of metacommunication. Most modern conceptions of phaticity further Jakobson's interpretation and his emphasis on controlling attention.

Phatic communion

Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Malinowski defines phatic communion as the function of speech in free, aimless, social intercourse in public spaces, living rooms, around the campfire, during work that doesn't require conscious effort, etc. and which serves to establish personal bonds between people who are united and held together by cultural norms of civil interaction, i.e. social sentiments.

It establishes an interpersonal relationship or fellowship between people who need companionship. Arguing against Franz Boas, who is quoted as saying that "speech is intended to serve for the communication of ideas", Ogden and Richards asserted that "much language, especially primitive language, is not primarily concerned with ideas at all, unless under 'ideas' are included emotions and attitudes", which Malinowski elaborated further in his supplement, outlining the social function of speech.

Malinowski held that in phatic communion people exchange words but they do not transmit thoughts or communicate ideas. Rather, words in phatic communion do not convey a meaning that is symbolically theirs but binds speakers as a mode of action. This aspect led the sociolinguist Dell Hymes to a simplistic but descriptive interpretation of phatic communion as "talking for the sake of talking". According to this interpretation, when housewives exchange stories about their children or anthropologists about their fieldwork they're not actually communicating but participating in a sort of "verbal togetherness".

As a response to Ogden and Richards

Most commentators on Malinowski's phatic communion, even when echoing his orientation to context, neglect the context of his supplement, i.e. the passages in the rest of The Meaning of Meaning that enlighten the origins of phatic communion. For example, Ogden and Richards advise drawing on the field investigator's own observations of the behavior of a speaker in a given situation and to take account of the concrete environment of the speaker in order to consider the "ideas" which are regarded as "expressed". In line with this advice, Malinowski found that the language use of the Trobriand Island inhabitants, when resting from work, is "not dependent upon what happens at the moment", so that "the outer situation does not enter directly into the technique of speaking".

Thus the primary semantic characteristic of phatic communion is that in the formulæ of greeting or approach, or "In 'good morning' and 'good-bye' the referential function lapses, i.e., these verbal signs are not symbols, it is enough if they are suitable", having "only to satisfy the condition of appropriateness". For example, when the Nepalese greet each other with the colloquial expression Bhat khanubhyo? ("Have you eaten rice?") they're not really asking for information about each other's eating habits but beginning a conversation appropriately. The expression itself, as it is used in everyday life, is virtually asemantic.

Ogden and Richards remarked on the difficulty of studying the non-symbolic influences of language use that pose numerous terminological inconveniences and are commonly grouped together as "emotive", but even this was not satisfactory for Malinowski, who stated that "It would be even incorrect, I think, to say that such words serve the purpose of establishing a common sentiment, for this is usually absent from such current phrases of intercourse; and where it purports to exist, as in expressions of sympathy, it is avowedly suprious on one side." While Ogden and Richards considered the emotive use of language to be more simple and primitive than the symbolic use, Malinowski took their suggestions to heart and discovered a speech function even more primitive among the "primitive" peoples he investigated.

This more primitive function of language pertains to neither the transmission of thought, coordination of action, nor excitement of feeling, but rather to talking about "either things to which we can point, or which occur freely in ordinary experience", such as "purposeless expressions of preference or aversion, accounts of irrelevant happenings, [and] comments on what is perfectly obvious". Echoing the classical example of two people in a room noticing the crepitation of rain against the window and saying "It's raining", Malinowski includes comments on weather along with inquiries about health as the common speech genres of phatic communion.

Ogden and Richards on enjoyment vs interpretation

Among the many noteworthy points that Ogden and Richards make that are congenial with the textual foundations of phatics, an especially symptomatic one is embodied in their quotation from W. E. Urwick, according to whom "ninety-nine per cent of the words used in talking to a little child have no meaning for him, except that, as the expression of attention to him, they please him". Not only would this explain the secondary nature of meaning in phatic communion but it would also account for the oft-neglected aspect of "social pleasure and self-enhancement" in Malinowski's treatment, not to mention La Barre's emphasis on the infant's idiosyncracies of expression in phatic communication and Jakobson's description of the phatic function as the first one acquired by infants.

Likewise, as an early manifestation of the influence of speech manuals on phaticity, Ogden and Ricards also quote a 19th Century manual on the art of conversation, stating that "it is agreed among us that people must meet frequently, both men and women, and that not only is it agreeable to talk, but that it is a matter of common courtesy to say something, even when there is hardly anything to say". Malinowski describes this kind of sociability as a bedrock aspect of human nature in society because "There is in all human beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other's company."

Thus, when Ogden and Richards note that all experience is either enjoyed or interpreted, a similar distinction can be found between the communication of ideas, which implies interpretation, and phatic communion, which involves a minimal degree of interpretation but a greater emphasis on enjoyment of other people's company. According to Malinowski, the mere presence of others is a necessity for humans, and phatic communion achieves a pleasant atmosphere of polite social intercourse.

Phatic communication

Weston La Barre

Weston La Barre defines phatic communication as inter-communication through vocalizations and other emotive signs which communicate a generalized emotional tone to other people throughout the group, so that they acquire a similar attitude towards a situation or event, illustrated by the acute phatic prescience of a mother with regard to her children's well-being, the phatic closeness of lovers, and the phatic nudges, pats, punches, pawing, and verbal face-making at parties.

While La Barre takes over the term "phatic", he negates Malinowski's negations, replacing the ambiguous concept of "communion" - which Malinowski arguably used exactly because of it's religious overtones and etymological priority to "communication" - and formed it into a conception of communication that draws on the dominant aspects of phatic communon but conflates these with nonverbal communication, in effect taking the anti-semantic idea of meaningless words to its philosophical absolute.

For example, while Malinowski explicitly distinguishes phatic communion from speech in action, La Barre holds that phatic communion sometimes binds the group to biologically useful common action, unifying the group as a kind of social hormone that allows individuals to foresee the actions of its fellows. Likewise, while Malinowski doubts if phatic communion serves the purpose of establishing a common sentiment, this is exactly the modus operandi of phatic communication. By "phatic" in general La Barre means the ability of social animals like humans to induce through inarticulate phatic communication an endocrinal or emotional state or a manipulatable state of mind in the other, which is necessary for both personal integration, i.e. rapport, and for achieving integration with cultural consensuses by taking on the symbolic systems of the society. Through phatic communication a human being can know that s/he belongs.

As an alternative reading of Malinowski

La Barre's treatment effectively represents an alternative reading of Malinowski's supplement and the rest of the book, exhibited by curious convergences in relation with the interplay between phatic and emotive functions. Thus, when Ogden and Richards write that "many of the most popular subjects of discussion are infested with symbolically blank but emotively active words", La Barre writes that "a quite surprising amount of human communication", particularly "political, diplomatic, economic, social, theological, philosophical, aesthetic, and amatory", "remains strictly phatic, for all its employment of articulate words" and "pretenses at semantic respectability".

Phatic communication in La Barre's sense makes us feel like communication has taken place when it actually hasn't, at least not in the sense of making genuine or verifiable statements about the structure of the universe. Human vocalizations are treated in his approach firstly as a kind of proto-language that we have in common with our nearest evolutionary relatives and which developed into articulate speech over time, and secondly as a kind of pseudo-language, which tends to devolop in human relationships - especially long-lasting, stable, and emotionally intense ones - and can convey incredible amounts of meaning and evoke large constellations of understanding merely by a nonlinguistic vocalization.

While Malinowski defines the phatic function of speech as mere sociabilities and convivial gregariousness, La Barre views the sociability and gregariousness of animals as preconditions for phatic communication in humans, arguing that "speech could never originate in a solitary animal". While the vocalizations of primates are on par with the vocalizations of other herding animals, primates need danger-warning cues and contact calls more than other land animals who have other means of defense and a better sense of smell.

In the development of semantic communication, i.e. language, La Barre emphasizes the role of the specifically human social organization of nuclear families within a large society. Here he relies on the argument that human speech arose from "animal sounds of a merely emotional character", which he traces from Edward Sapir and Louis Boutan to Rousseau and Vico, and Lucretius and Epicurus, and finally to Democritus, ending this line of influence with the remark, "I do not know where Democritus got the idea".

La Barre in Context

La Barre's preconditions for the growth of language in humans are: the "neurobiotactical" freedom to learn from experience and nurture instead of mechanical instincts, and huge associated brain areas that show persistent coping with human symbol-synthesis ; the human infant's "fetalization" and exaggerated dependence on adults as its primary "environment" for a long time after birth, which enable the adults to "domesticate" children with their "non-real symbolic systems"; repeated experience of contexts by the same individuals and long-continued, stable, and intense emotional ties between them, i.e. relationships; extremely close organic-phatic libidinal ties, to bring about the blandly accepted, the multiple taken-for-granted agreements which inhere in and make up all arbitrary semantic communication; and commonly experienced context of meaning or sign-situations in a group, especially in the nuclear family. All these conditions make the Homo sapiens a "hyper-mammal".

In the human family he sees the primordial "phatic conditions" of communication, i.e. there is an expectation of "a reasonably intermittent flow of phatic reply" among spouses, the lack of which may infuriate one if the other holds to an unpermitted and thoroughly suspect emotional privacy. Here La Barre is actually prefiguring the exact illustration taken up in the Relevance Theory approach, as well as communication about relationship by turning Malinowski's comments on weather into a metaphor: "an exchange of polite opinions about the weather between two thoroughly sober people has [no] real concern with or bearing upon current or proximate meteorological events: in this, people are taking the temperature and assessing the humidity of the inter-individual weather, not the earthly".

It is worthwhile to note that in several ways La Barre prefigured both his contemporaries as well as modern and unrelated developments. For example, he took up the aspect of resting from work in Malinowski's treatment and elaborated, saying that the "conversations" of apes are not so different from those of prestiged human groups, as both engage in phatic communication when "well-fed, free from danger, and uninterested either in sexuality or in fighting on a mild morning". In this way, both phatic communion and phatic communication represent a leisure activity. This mirrors a contemporary development in psychology, i.e. Leon Festinger's consummatory communication.

He also remarks that the conversation of human adolescents often consist of "group-conformormity-making pejoratives, encomiastics, and intensificatives", Unaware of La Barre's work, some modern phatic studies have similarly investigated the use of dysphemisms and verbal rudeness, as well as vocatives and intensifiers, among young people, with special attention to how taboo words are used in a friendly, playful, and sociable way that establish and strengthen bonds between the speakers. La Barre does not neglect to mention that secretive ingroups among criminals and adolescents often create new sub-languages or argots with an emphasis on exclusiveness.

Another congeniality with his contemporaries is his concept of the phatic context. Among constant companions like a college room-mate, with whom one attends the same classes, reads the same books, partakes of same entertainments, and knows the same people, there tends to develop a "burden" on phatic context, so that learned, habitual, and familiar situations "become more and more burdened by common memory of specific contexts, more and more colored by individual personal idiosyncracy, and richer and richer in private emotional connotation". This emphasis on common experience is also found in the concept of communization.

In the end, he even holds that "A surprisingly large part of every culture is merely the phatic sharing of common emotional burdens, and has no relevance at all to the outside world". Despite the theoretical richness and intricacy of La Barre's theory of phatic communication, it remains an idiosyncracy rarely, if ever, consulted in modern phatic studies. Most researchers, even those who explicitly subscribe to Malinowski, rely more on Roman Jakobson's alternative interpretation of the phatic function.

Phatic function

Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson defines the phatic function of speech as pertaining to the set of linguistic messages operating upon the physical channel and psychological connection in (telephone) conversation, inter-locution, and dialogue, serving to start, establish, maintain, sustain, prolong, and discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works, to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention.

Despite writing a single paragraph about it, the influence of his interpretation of the phatic function outshines even Malinowski's. It is also most imbued with history among the textual foundations of phatics, and jam-packed with implicit references to contemporaries, the implicity of which can be ascribed to his non-chalant lack of proper citations. In his own writings, especially theoretical discussions of the history of linguistics, as well as particular analyses of poetry, he makes frequent use of all the linguistic functions he outlined in his famous paper, "Linguistics and poetics", all except the phatic, that is. This can be readily explained by looking at the development of his scheme of linguistic functions.

The context in which Jakobson was working

In the end of the 19th Century, various thinkers distinguished two primary types of language or language use. For example, Alexander Potebnja distinguished poetic language from prosaic (practical) language, one being the language of everyday communication and the other a figurative transformation of the former for aesthetic purposes. For Jakobson, as a member of the Russian formalists, this was the starting point for arriving at a view of language in general as constituted hierarchically by particular subcodes with distinct roles in language use. Later he himself reflected that the poet W. B. Yeats distinguished between emotional symbols and intellectual symbols as early as the year 1900. At that time, the poetic and emotive uses of language were not clearly distinguished, as evidenced by Susanne Langer's extensive discussion of discursive and non-discursive forms of representation.

During his time with the Prague linguistic circle, which he co-founded, Jakobson worked closely with Jan Mukařovský, together with whom they added a fourth function to the three concretized by Karl Bühler (i.e. expression, appeal, and representation). This fourth, aesthetic function, pertains to poetic reference. This is effectively the first metafunction, distinguished from the other functions, which variously establish an active relation between the linguistic sign and one of the three extralinguistic factors (the speaker, the listener, and the object referred to), by its introversive relation to itself, putting the linguistic sign as a sign at the center of attention.

After his move to America during WWII, Jakobson "read all that was written by the communication engineers, especially American and English", and replaced the Saussurean concepts of langue and parole in his discourse with the communication theory concepts of code and message. Around the same time, Jakobson formulated another metafunction, which he called the metalinguistic function, after the meta- and object-language distinction of the logicians. The earliest formulation of the metalingual function in Jakobson's writings can be found in a phonological study, first drafted in 1950, where he plays around with his new concepts of code and message and outlines four "duplex structures", one of them being "the autonymous form of speech (M/C)" where the message operates on the code. Here, as with the previous metafunction (poetic), the linguistic sign foregrounds itself by defining a given word by way of synonymy (i.e. a bachelor is an unmarried man). At this point all but one linguistic function have been described.

The impetus to add yet another function, which was already relatively well-known in anthropology, to his ultimate scheme, may have originated from a conference Jakobson attended in 1955 (a year before first presenting his scheme), which was dedicated to the problem of expressive language behavior. There Jakobson reported on his fifth, metalingual function in relation with aphasia. While other participants of that conference, such as Susanne Langer, were still primarily concerned with the division of language into separate conceptual and emotive spheres, Jakobson may have been inspired by this reinvigoration of functionalist thinking in America to reformulate Malinowski's social function of phatic communion into simply phatic function, based on then-recent developments in the field of (speech) communication.

Jakobson's definition of the phatic function

The single paragraph he wrote about the matter reads as follows:

There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works ("Hello, do you hear me?"), to attract 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. Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' he said. 'Well, here we are', he said. 'Here we are', she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were', he said, 'Eeyop! Here we are'. 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well'." The endeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one they share with human beings when conversing with them. It is also the first verbal function acquired by infants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication.

Precursors to the definition of "phatic function" found in the work of Jakobson's contemporaries

This iconic passage can be separated into distinct sections, the first illustrating the operations of the phatic function of speech, the second defining it as a means of prolonging communication with a literary illustration, and the third characterizing it as the first function acquired by infants and the only one humans share with talking birds. Although Jakobson cites only Malinowski, the whole passage is likely full of implicit references to his contemporaries. Although Jakobson does not give precise citations in this work, in most cases there is documented evidence of him reading the following sources:

• Orval Hobart Mowrer, writing "On the psychology of 'talking birds'". Jakobson cites Mowrer in a companion piece.
• David Abercrombie wroute about phatic communion the same year that Jakobson introduced the phatic function. Both authors draw examples from the writings of of Dorothy Parker.
• Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, who together formulated the concept of metacommunication in the early 1950s.

"Talking birds": Orval Mowrer

The first key to understanding Jakobson's phatic function is the seemingly passing remark about "talking birds". A few years after publishing "Linguistics and poetics", Jakobson wrote a companion-piece, titled "Language in operation", in which he illustrates the operation of his linguistic functions on the example of him overhearing a scrap of conversation about Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" aboard a train. Despite not using the words "phatic" or "contact", he gives the crucial clue and a citation: "For talking birds, however, as their student Mowrer noted, vocalization is primarily a means of getting their human partner to continue communication with them and to give in fact no sign of parting."

Citing the work of Orval Hobart Mowrer, particularly his paper "On the psychology of "talking birds"," Jakobson in fact introduces a feature not present in Malinowski's original supplement to his interpretation. While Malinowski was elucidating the raison d'étre of such formulæ of greeting or approach as "How do you do?" and "Nice day today", Jakobson adds that these may be "profuse" and that there may be "entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication". These aspects are lifted directly out of Mowrer's study of talking birds.

Mowrer writes that after the early stages of training, when the feeding and watering of the bird has been tied up with the training procedure, the bird becomes attached to the trainer, and the presence and attention of the trainer become important to the bird, so that it will make every effort to keep the trainer near at hand. This is almost in line with Malinowski's conception phatic communion, particularly his note that "Many instincts and innate trends [...] are dependent upon and associated with the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man". The difference being that with talking birds this is an outcome of bird training, i.e. human intervention.

The comparison with talking birds itself is not without precedent, as Ogden and Richards, too, write that for the psittacists a word is merely a stimulus without the occurrence of any reference and that they respond to words much as they would respond to a musical note. Mowrer likewise finds that "words may be said by the bird without much reference to the outward effects they produce" and "in this respect they may be compared to the "babbling" or "vocal play" of human infants". With regard to this analogy, Jakobson is saying that when humans talk with birds, only phatic communication is possible between them. Note that in the text published in 1960, Jakobson had removed the sentence ending, "when conversing with them" from the remark about talking birds.

Mowrer's text also enlightens the reasoning behind Jakobson's view of the exchange of greetings as "profuse", with an emphasis on prolonging communication (both of these aspects are completely absent from the other textual foundations). Namely, when the bird becomes attached to the trainer, it is rewarding for the bird just to be with him or her. Apparently the birds are not very talkative as such, but open up with the repertoire they are famous for at the very moment the trainers start to leave. He recounts an anecdote of a parrot being grumpy and untalkative on a cold day, saying nothing to the visiting children until they started to walk away, after which the bird clearly uttered a phrase not taught to it: "Don't go." This can be considered the quintessential phatic utterance, at least according to Jakobson's interpretation of the phatic function.

Mowrer also noted that the birds learn to repeat the trainer's "Hello" more readily than his "Good-bye". By analogy, this would explain the curious emphasis on prolonging, sustaining, and continuing communication and giving no sign of parting. But it could also originate from another source. In the same year that Jakobson first presented his scheme, David Abercrombie published his lectures, wherein he discusses phatic communion and arrives at a similar point through Malinowski's remark about another man's silence not being a reassuring factor. Abercrombie says that in a friendly conversation it is most important to avoid silence. When someone volunteers a piece of conversation it is necessary to answer, even if the response is purely formal and conveys no information, because the conversation must keep going to prevent the discomfort of a pause.

Phatic communion and polite conversation: David Abercrombie and Dorothy Parker

Although his solution for prolonging communication is what he calls a comment, i.e. responding to an assertion or statement with "Isn't it?", Abercrombie's treatment is significant in several regards. For example, his general attitude towards phatic communion is comparable to that of La Barre, particularly when he writes that "the actual sense of the words used in phatic communion matters little; it is facial expression and intonation that are probably the important things". It may also be that Abercrombie influenced Jakobson's choice of illustrations. Namely, it is mighty suspicious that both of them quote the American author Dorothy Parker. While Jakobson picked his excerpt from a published short story, Abercrombie recounts an anecdote:

It is said that Dorothy Parker, alone and rather bored at a party, was asked 'How are you? What have you been doing?' by a succession of distant acquaintances. To each she replied, 'I've just killed my husband with an axe, and I feel fine.' Her intonation and expression were appropriate to party small-talk, and with a smile and a nod each acquaintance, unastonished, drifted on.

Since Jakobson did not cite all of his influence (which might have been impossible, considering the length and extent of his intellectual activities), it is a matter of guesswork if these are merely coincidences. This is doubly so with perhaps the most significant analogy that can be found in the writings of his contemporaries. Just like the poetic and metalingual function, the phatic function is essentially a metafunction, operating not on any of the three extralinguistic factors but on the act of communication itself. In this sense, and in most of its details, the phatic function is comparable to the concept of metacommunication. Some even consider them completely interchangeable.

"Metacommunication": Ruesch and Bateson

It is possible that among the American and English communication theorists Jakobson claimed to read in the early 1950s were the American psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch and English anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who together formulated the concept of metacommunication or communication about communication. Initially the concept included all exchanged cues and propositions about (a) codification and (b) relationship between the communicators. Although they argued that no sharp line can be drawn between these, as the "majority of propositions about codification are also implicit or explicit propositions about relationship and vice versa", over time communication about codification nevertheless gave way to Jakobson's more popular metalingual function, and Bateson himself later reformulated communication about relationship into what he called the μ-function.

Ruesch and Bateson described the process of constituting a determinative group, an interpersonal communication systems of a higher order, defined in terms of mutual awareness of perception. They believe that this can be operationally observed in whether participants in a communication system modify their emission of signals in a self-corrective manner according to their knowledge of whether the signals are audible, visible, or intelligible to the other participants. That is, metacommunication can be observed by identifying any signals of the following types:

1. signals whose only meaning would be the acknowledgment of a signal emitted by another;
2. signals asking for a signal to be repeated;
3. signals indicating failure to receive a signal;
4. signals which punctuate the stream of signals; and so on.

They hold that if there is complete awareness of the other's perception, an individual should stop repeating a signal once it has been received and acknowledged by the other individual. This type of self-correction would indicate mutual perceptive awareness. Jakobson evidently borrowed some of their phraseology but applied it on his own linguistic investigation of distinctive features. Instead of the interconnection between communicating individuals, he was interested in the interconnection of distinctive features, which he subscribed to "the internal logic of communication systems that are endowed with a self-regulating and self-steering capacity".

This mismatch of theoretical interests would explain why Jakobson himself neglected to further the study of the phatic function of communication. The linguistic messages about communicative contact (e.g. "Are you listening?", "Um-hum!", "Can you repeat that?", "Do you hear me?", "I should go now...", etc.) reveal little, if anything, about the internal workings of language. They do, however, reveal the effects of shared cultural premises, which determine "the adjustment patterns used in social interaction", i.e. social techniques.

The last entry in this line of speculation is also the most simplistic. Namely, the operations that the phatic function is purported to achieve - to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication - are curiously analogous to the types of social techniques distinguished by Ruesch:

1. In approaching a person or situation the techniques are designed to test out the unknown, to attract and to appease the suspicious and hostile feelings of other persons; to unthaw or seduce, to promise or to flatter. These techniques serve the purpose to prepare the situation for the next step, namely,
2. to establish a workable relationship between the various persons concerned. These techniques vary according to the rôle that the person assumes, but a guiding factor is the maintenance and stability of the once established relationship.
3. At times it is necessary to prepare the detachment from persons or situations when they have outlived their usefulness.

Regardless of whether these are genuine influences or mere congenialities, they can serve as useful sources for elaborating and extending the phatic function in novel directions. They fill in the crucial blanks in the theory, which are frequently ignored by later interpretations of the phatic function which took only Jakobson's single paragraph as their basis (cf. phatic images, phatic photographs, and phatic fountains). Such reductive approaches not only fail to broaden the scope of phaticity in a significant way but sometimes lead to a view of the phatic function as an inherently dysfunctional concept.

Contemporary cognates

Work in progress.

Communization

• Charles Morris
• Jurgen Ruesch
• Richard Fiordo

Consummatory communication

• Leon Festinger

Collective monologue

• Roy Harris
• Jean Piaget

Other parallels

Sociability

• Georg Simmel

Social techniques

• Jurgen Ruesch

Face-work

• Erving Goffman

Further elaborations

Communicative functions of phatic communion

• John Laver

Phatic acts

• John Austin

Phatic images, photographs, and fountains

• Paul Virilio
• Katharina Lobinger
• Lisa Robinson

Modern models

Small talk

• Justine Coupland
• Nikolas Coupland
• Jeffrey D. Robinson

Relevance Theory approach

• Gregory Ward
• Laurence R. Horn
• Manuel Padilla Cruz

Conviviality

• Piia Varis
• Jan Blommaert

Novel approaches

Phatic technologies

• Christian Licoppe
• Frank Vetere
• Victoria Wang

Phatic media culture

• Vincent Miller

Phatic infrastructure

• Julia Elyachar

Application

Second-language acquisition

• David Abercrombie

Mental health nursing

• Philip Burnard

Intercultural pragmatics

• Victor Ho
• Yasuko Obana
• Vincenza Tudini

New developments

Phatic community construction

• Patricia Prieto Blanco

Phatic traces

• Shunsuke Nozawa

Phatic studies

• Joe Corneli
• Rasmus Rebane

See also

• Backchannel (linguistics)
• Sense of community

References

Category:Communication theory Category:Anthropology Category:Semiotics Category:Linguistics Category:Pragmatics Category:Sociolinguistics