A Study Of Phatic Communion From The Perspecitve Of Relevance Theory

The term phatic communion is first proposed by Polish-born British anthropologistMalinowski. He defined it as "a type of speech in which ties of union are created bymere exchange of words". Actually in daily life we all use such small, seeminglymeaningless expressions to maintain a comfortable relation between people withoutinvolving any factual information. Previous studies on phatic communication werelargely examined from the perspective of social linguistics, functional linguistics, andcross-culture communication and so on. But less has been done through theperspective of cognition. Phatic communion has long been thought of as an essentiallysocial phenomenon and therefore beyond the scope of cognitive theory. However, anadequate explanation of phatic interpretations requires an account of the cognitiveprocess that is used in deriving them. This thesis tries to analyze the phaticcommunions from the perspective of cognition based on Dan Sperber and DeidreWilson’s relevance theory. According to relevance theory, the understanding ofutterances in the process of communication is based on the human cognitionassumption. It shows that the communication is relevance-oriented. Phaticcommunication is also part of the communication, how does the relevance theoryexplain the process of interpretation is the focus of this paper. Data will be collectedfrom a popular American TV series “Big Bang Theory” and the correspondingcontexts will be analyzed. Normally phatic communions are likely to appear at thebeginning and the end of conversation. This study collects data from the beginningpart.Based on Relevance theory the phatic communication should possess followingproperties:1) it is easy to process;2) it is mutually manifest to the interlocutors inwhat kind of context the linguistic meaning of the utterances would be highly relevant;3) it is mutually manifest that the speaker could not have intended the main relevanceof the utterance to lie with it’s linguistic meaning on the particular occasion. Theinferential process of phatic communions goes like this: When we hear an utterance,they first pay attention to the linguistic meaning, in most cases, the exploration of thelinguistic meaning will give rise to enough effects will yield enough contextual effectsto offset the processing effort that is acquired for achieving this effect, but if it fails todo so, the hearer is likely to go one step further to think about whether some effectscould be derived by the action of ostension, that is what exactly happened in phaticcommunion. In addition, this paper also tries to explain why some of the phaticcommunications are successful while others are not. The aim of this study is to findout how relevance theory explains the phenomenon of phatic communion in theconversation and hopefully it will help us to raise the awareness of phaticcommunication in our daily life.