Phatic Communion

Hey. How are you? Did you see the big game last night? It’s brilliant weather we’re having; maybe a bit too brilliant, eh?! Catch you later!

If you speak English, you’ll immediately recognise the sentence above. In fact, you probably utter similar phrases every day - at the office, at the shops, outside the school when you drop the kids off.

It’s small talk; chit-chat; patter. It’s a bubblegum-like back-n-forth: pleasant for a short while, but soon gets stale. This boilerplate is often delivered through not-quite-genuine smiles.

Even though you might detest it, small talk serves a useful purpose. In linguistics, it also has a fancy name.

Phatic Communion

In the early 20th century, Bronislaw Malinowski–a Polish-British ethnologist–called this type of throwaway chatter ‘phatic communion’. In an essay featured in The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Malinowski said small talk ‘fulfils a social function’ and that phatic phrases ‘are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the listener.’ 

In this respect, language is used to ‘establish bonds of personal union between people…and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas.’

In her excellent book, Linguistics: An Introduction, Jean Aitchison describes phatic communion as ‘a device to maintain social contact on a friendly level’.

Tutto Apposto

Phatic Communion is universal. In Italian, ‘how are you?’ becomes come si dice (‘how do they say’), and the phatic reply is beh, che si dice (well, that’s the word). Or, you can throw an ‘all good’ into your repertoire with a tutto apposto (all in place; all good).

In parts of Ireland, you’ll know it’s Spring thanks to the lengthening of days and the ‘grand stretch in the evening’ passersby might laud as you walk past each other. 

Hiberno-English mixes with Irish to produce interrogatives such as ‘any scéal?’ (story), and is quite often abbreviated further to simply ‘scéal’ or ‘story’.

The Co Operative Principle

But, if phatic phrases do not ‘serve any purpose of communicating ideas’ as Malinowski claimed, then how do ideas actually get communicated? What rules govern conversation? 

In his famous essay, Logic and Conversation, British linguist Paul Grice observed that ‘our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did.’ 

From that starting point, he devised a framework called the Co Operative Principle, which he divided into four quadrants - Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner.

Each section is headed by a maxim or supermaxim:

Quantity - ‘make your contribution as informative as required; no more, no less’

Quality  - ‘try to make your contribution one that is true’

Relation  - ‘be relevant’

Manner - ‘be perspicuous’

In addition, Grice noted conversational Implicatures or Implicatum, as he called them. If I tell you my car has no petrol left and you tell me there’s a garage around the corner, you could be violating the ‘be relevant’ maxim. 

However, you could also think the garage is open and will serve me petrol, in which case no maxim is violated. Grice called this response an ‘implicatum’.

Real responses to phatic phrases

Part of the issue with small talk, apart from the utter banality, comes when Grice’s maxims are violated. The times when you throw a quick come si dice to a coworker who decides to abandon social convention and launch into a warts-n-all account of how badly things are going for him at the minute.

People acting in bad faith will understand you don’t really want to know how badly things are going for them. They know you’re simply engaging in a social custom to maintain relations.

The best way to avoid these scenarios is to use unambiguous phatic phrases instead of phatic questions. It’s a lot harder for Jim to break convention if you don’t offer him the chance to do so. 

To battle the Jims of the world, it’s much better to just remark on the weather and move on.

Incidentally, there’s a grand stretch in the evenings.