Characteristics Of Phatic Communion As A Language Game

Among the philosophical theories in the later period of the world famous philosopher—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1933-1934), the most important concept is "language-game". Bases on "language-game", this paper discusses phatic communion as a daily communication activity to find that phatic communion, like other language games, has purpose, diversity, fun, principle and dynamics. Meanwhile, this paper also puts these game characteristics under relevant theoretical framework for observation to find that the relevance theory has a strong explanatory power for the characteristics of phatic communion as a language game, that is to say, the meaning expression process of phatic communion reflects dual nature of daily language use, i.e., dynamic selectivity under the control of principle. Therefore, the author holds that phatic communion in daily life is usually the consequence that language structure adapts dynamically to the context, and the comprehension of phatic communion implication needs to rely on correct understanding of contextual information.This paper firstly extends from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the later period, starts from Wittgenstein’s "language-game", combines some important and most representative topics of his later philosophy, and analyzes the specific performance of the value of daily language in the later period of Wittgenstein. On that basis, this paper takes research achievements of senior scholars for reference, uses Wittgenstein’s "language-game" view and its performance in our life as theoretical basis, and treats daily and specific living world as scientific research base to discuss the characteristics of language-game, and proposes the research on phatic communion language-game characteristics under relevant theoretical framework through the analysis of the research on phatic communion in the academia to provide a new perspective for the research on phatic communion. Then the paper introduces from the main viewpoints of relevant theories to point out that people’s language communication is totally dominated by the principle of relevance, and as a language game, phatic communion’s emergence and comprehension system is also dominated by the principle of relevance.Based on the analysis of nearly200phatic dialogues collected from popular television series in the last three years as well as the author’s collection in daily life recording, this paper summarizes and concludes the phatic utterances forms and their language-game characteristics, and the author draws the conclusion that the research on the language-game characteristics of phatic communion under the framework of relevant theories can help to reveal the essence of success or failure of phatic communion from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, and can give reasonable explanation of phatic communion and guide people to identify hidden communicative purpose of phatic utterances through "ostensive-inference" so as to achieve successful phatic communion.