An Ontological Study Of Phatic Communion And Its Interpretation

Phatic communion was first introduced by famous social anthropologist Malinowski (1923) when he was studying functions of language. He defined it as"a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words". He treated it as the language used in free, aimless social communication, which occurs when people are relaxing or when they are accompanying"some manual work by gossip quite unconnected with what they are doing."In conversations, phatic communion plays the role of establishing and maintaining the social relationships. Linguistically speaking, phatic communion is a speech act, whose interpretation methods differentiate from an encoding-decoding semantic process. Therefore, phatic communion is related to some important research issues. But in recent years, it only receives a sporadic treatment. Some scholars even consider it to be merely meaningless and aimless communication. Besides, the categorizations from different aspects only add to the complexity for further studies.In order to prompt the researches on phatic communion and draw the academic attention to this linguistic phenomenon, the author of this dissertation has done a systematic study on the basis of previous studies. Through discussions and analyses of corpus from two American TV series, the following conclusions are drawn: 1) Laver's categorization is more persuasive and appropriate in sorting different phatic utterances; therefore, categorization of this dissertation is slightly revised to reflect the real situation. Therefore, phatic communion is categorized into four categories from the interlocutor-oriented angel: a) neutral, b) mutual, c) self-oriented, d) other-oriented. 2) Phatic communion has nothing to do with the semantic information in each utterance. It copes with the manifestation of the communicative intention between the speaker and the hearer to build up social relationships. 3) In social activities, phatic communication serves some positive functions, which establish or maintain social relationships and reduces and eliminates the conflicts and divergences. 4) Relevance Theory does have explanatory power in the interpretation of phatic communion. Different categories of phatic communion can be comprehended properly under this theory.