A Pragmatic Study On Phatic Communion From Adaptation Perspective Based On The Data Collected From Desperate Housewives

Phatic communion is the most common linguistic phenomenon which permeates into every aspects of people's daily life. This term is first proposed and used by Malinowski in the early twentieth century. In the course of his ethnographic researches, Malinowski discovers that not all the interactions aim at providing or getting information, some are just for establishing and maintaining social contacts. In the paper The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages published in 1923, he calls such interactions as phatic communion that is characterized by smallness and purposelessness. Since then, more and more scholars have turned their eyes to this field of study.Language use is inseparable from context, so is the phatic communion. In view of the previous studies, there are few theoretical studies on this linguistic phenomenon and most of the studies just neglect the contextual functioning in phatic communion. Taking this into account, this thesis attempts to draw support from Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory and unify the context to make a comprehensive study on phatic communion.Hereon this thesis makes a review of the previous studies on phatic communion both from abroad and at home, presents its theoretical framework-Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory in detail, and selects the most popular and better life-like American TV series Desperate Housewives as its data source to collect necessary phatic dialogues and the corresponding contexts. In the theoretical framework of linguistic adaptation theory, this thesis analyzes the data in terms of three correlated aspects-adaptation to physical world, adaptation to social world and adaptation to mental world, through which the author of this thesis endeavors to make a comprehensive study on the contextual adaptation of phatic communion from the integral of cognitive, social and cultural perspective.The major findings of this research are that phatic communion is a language choice-making process in which communicators dynamically make adaptation to the physical world, mental world and social world with variable degrees of consciousness; it is a complex linguistic choice-making activity but not the habitual, formulaic and static language use. In the end, this thesis also discusses the problems one should pay attention to in the use of phatic communion, which aims at enhancing people's contextual awareness so as to realize the communicative ends smoothly and making better use of phatic communion as a lubricant to create good atmosphere of sociability, maintain social relationships and propel the construction of harmonious society.Studying the contextual adaptation of phatic communion in the theoretical framework of linguistic adaptation theory, not only brings the contextual factors into forefront, but also offers a new idea and a new perspective to this field of study, so the research of this thesis enriches and deepens the study of phatic communion. However, because of various constraints, limitations still exist; more effort and time should be spent on the enrichment and perfection of this study in the future.