Abstract
In this discussion note we explore why and how we need a pragmalinguistic and speech act-anchored approach to systematically study a key pragmatic phenomenon: phatic interaction. By so doing, we aim to draw attention to a special issue which we plan to publish in Acta Linguistica Academica. First, we present a general model through which phatic interaction can be replicably studied across different data types and linguacultures, by breaking it down to speech act types occurring in different slots of an interaction. Second, we provide a case study involving Chinese learners of English as a foreign language, in order to illustrate how the proposed framework can be put to actual use.
1 Introduction
This discussion note explores why and how a speech act-anchored pragmalinguistic approach can help us to systematically capture phatic interaction. Our goal here is to draw attention to a forthcoming special issue, which we aim to publish in Acta Linguistica Academica. Following conventional generic requirements holding for discussion notes, we do not so much intend to provide a comprehensive empirical study, but rather generate academic interest and further discussion as the label ‘discussion note’ already indicates. Accordingly, instead of providing the reader with the standard ingredients of a fully-fledged paper, including ‘Review of literature’, ‘Methodology’ and so on, this short study only consists of a ‘Proposed approach’ and a ‘Case study’ section.
Phatic language use encompasses all types of ritual interaction (cf. Kádár 2017) which are conventionally clustered around the opening and closing phases of an interaction, as well as Small Talk occurring during the Core phase of an encounter (see Edmondson et al., 2022). Conventionally, the study of phatic interaction ‘belongs’ to the realm of sociopragmatics and sociolinguistics (see e.g. Coupland, Coupland & Robinson 1992; Senft 2009; Holmes 2010; Jaworski 2014), and rightly so, considering that phatic talk is indeed an integral part of social interaction. Further, it was anthropologists and sociologists – in particular Malinowski (1935) and Goffman (e.g. 1971) – whose seminal studies triggered significant interest in the study of this phenomenon. Yet, we believe that there is also a definite need to approach phatic interaction through a strictly language-anchored and bottom-up empirical procedure, in particular through the linguistic concept of speech acts. Both this discussion note and the planned special issue aim to fill this methodological gap. Using the terminology of the late Editor of Acta Linguistics Professor Ferenc Kiefer, used to say, what we propose in this discussion note represents a typically ‘hard-pragmatic’ rather than ‘soft-pragmatic’ approach to phatic language use. In the following section we discuss this approach in detail.
Our pragmalinguistic take on phatic interaction does, of course, not represent a stand-alone attempt in the field of pragmatics: various scholars such as Edmondson & House (2011), Jucker (2011) and House (2011a) have essentially relied on ‘hard-pragmatic’ methodologies to investigate phatic language use. However, to the best of our knowledge, no research has attempted to examine phatic language use in various languages and data types by using a uniform research design, such as the framework introduced in brief in this discussion note.
2 Proposed approach
We use an interactional typology of speech acts in order to break down the various recurring elements of phatic interaction in an encounter into distinct and finite speech act categories occurring in specific slots of an interaction (see Edmondson & House, 2011; Edmondson et al., 2022). Figure 1 on the next page displays our typology.
Our typology of speech acts
Citation: Acta Linguistica Academica 69, 3; 10.1556/2062.2022.00533
In making a Remark, a speaker shows himself favourably disposed towards his hearer. … The speaker initiating a conversation via a Remark shows thereby that his intention in so doing is innocuous. (Edmondson & House 2011, 169)
A Disclose essentially gives biographic information, such that through this information the hearer “knows one better”. (Edmondson & House 2011, 173)
Whenever the speaker realises a remark stating the obvious (see e.g. ‘It's nice weather, isn't it?’), basically he communicates what all participants involved already know, and so the utterance serves to create rapport (Spencer-Oatey, 2005) and nothing else. However, the typology represented in Figure 1 is not a rigid system, and according to our approach to phatic interaction – which is based on this typology – various speech acts which by default do not ‘belong to’ the phatic group can also fulfil a phatic function when they ‘migrate’ into the phatic slot in certain contexts.
The ‘ritual’ cluster of speech acts, involving speech acts frequented in the Opening and Closing phases of an interaction, are particularly prone to fulfil a phatic function because rituals are very often phatic and ritual speech acts are often centred around in the phatic Opening and Closing of an interaction. Methodologically speaking, it is fruitful to focus on phatic uses of speech acts belonging to the ritual group, for the following reasons: In House & Kádár (forthcoming) we found that there is significant linguacultural variation between the capacity of ritual speech acts to naturally migrate into the phatic slot. In that study, we conducted a large corpus-based study, 1 comparing uses of Greet expressions in Chinese and English. We found that, in English, the use of Greet forms is compulsory and ubiquitous in any relationship. The use of Chinese Greet forms, on the other hand, is mostly frequented in formal interactions in which the participants are in a clear power relationship. Since these results are corpus-based, they represent linguaculturally dominant pragmatic conventions only.
This does not mean that Chinese interactants can ‘get away’ without greeting each other. Consider the following constructed example:
| A: (smiles and waves hand) | 哎, 处长! | |
| Grunt of recognition, Office Head! |
|
| B: (waves hand) | 张老师! |
| Professor Zhang! |
| A: | 吃饭了没有? |
| Have you eaten already? | |
| How-are-you (Phatic) |
| B: | 吃了, 你呢? |
| I have, and you? | |
| Tell, How-are-you (Phatic) |
From a speech act point of view, it is unclear whether there is a proper Greet realisation here because the adjacent address forms in turns 1–2 themselves are only minimal realisations of Greet. Also, as the Ø symbol indicates, the above interaction could well occur without any verbal clues in turns 1–2, i.e. there is a possibility of a zero-Greet here, while the adjacent How-are-you speech act realisations in turns 3–4 are conventionally required in a ritual encounter between colleagues. The importance of How-are-you realisations does not mean, however, that ‘nothing is happening’ in turns 1–2. Without expressing ritual recognition in some form, the phatic exchange in turns 3–4 may simply not occur. So, our general point here is that Greet realisations in Chinese are not as ubiquitous and have a weaker relationship with phatic interaction than their comparable English counterparts.
Such a cross-cultural pragmatic difference between English and Chinese implies the following: In English, phatic language use in the Opening of an interaction normally involves the speech act Greet, which cannot be ‘substituted’ by other speech acts (simply put: a Hello is normally echoed with another Hello before ‘anything happens’ in the interaction – any breach of this pattern triggers impolite evaluations). The situation is very different in the typologically distant Chinese linguaculture because here the use of Greet is not only more frequent in power relationships than in other settings according to our corpus study, but also Greet may be ‘substituted’ by other speech acts. In other words, in Opening interaction in Chinese, phatic language use has a relatively weaker relationship with the speech act Greet than is the case in English. This notion of relative ‘weakness’ accords with Leech's (1983) idea of the importance of scales in modelling pragmatic phenomena. 2
Having introduced the framework underlying our forthcoming special issue, in the remainder of the current discussion note we present a case study of how this framework can be put to practical use. In this case study, we focus on problems relating to phatic interaction in the context of learning English as a foreign language.
3 Case study
3.1 Experiment
If one expects the other to utter a greeting and the greeting fails to come, or one is greeted when no such greeting is expected, gut feelings of irritation may emerge. Garfinkel (1964) explained such irritations through the concept of the ‘moral order’ of interaction. The moral order is particularly important in phatic interaction rituals, which are such fundamental parts of our daily encounters that language users do not devote much attention to them until a breach occurs (cf. Kádár 2017).
In the following, we report on a small experiment which we conducted with two groups of ten native speakers of English and Chinese respectively, in order to examine whether cross-cultural pragmatic differences between phatic language use and the speech act Greet in English and Chinese influence the ability of Chinese learners of English to adequately recognise certain uses of English Greet expressions. Our research questions were as follows:
-
How do native speakers of English evaluate unconventional and unexpected non-phatic uses of greeting in English?
-
How do Chinese learners evaluate the same unconventional and unexpected non-phatic uses of greeting in English?
Our native speakers of English were educated British nationals. All our Chinese respondents were very advanced learners of English with an English as a foreign language major background.
In this experiment we constructed a set of situations in an Anglophone context in which the ubiquitous speech act Greet fails to get realised by one of the interactants, and the other interactant realises the speech act Complain in turn, by uttering ‘And a very good morning to you too’. While this particular utterance often functions as a conventionalised Greet itself, in the context we created it operates as a response to the non-occurrence of an expected Greet. Considering that interpreting the situated function of this Greet as a Complain requires a certain amount of contextual information, we provided detailed descriptions of the situations in which this utterance occurs in the written production task we asked our respondents to fill out. Our two groups of respondents were presented with the utterance ‘And a very good morning to you too’ occurring in different situations differentiated according to the standard sociolinguistic parameters Social Distance and Power [+/–SD, +/–P].
In pragmatics, it was the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization (CCSARP) Project (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) which first used the variables of [+/–SD,+/–P] on a large scale. Later on, scholars such as Cohen (2008) and McConarchy (2019) introduced other variables, and recently Nilsson et al. (2020, 2) argued that “age, gender, participant roles, medium and venue affect speakers' choice of greeting form.” Notwithstanding the importance of such additional variables, in this discussion we rely on the basic [+/–SD, +/–P] variables because in our view these variables are best compatible with contrastive corpus analysis (see also House & Kádár 2022).
The written production task included the following four situations:
-
1. You enter a friend's room in the dormitory who had said he was sick and who turns out to be completely healthy, playing computer game. You feel angry and disappointed.
You say: …
Your friend responds: “And a very good morning to you too.”
([–P, –SD] situation)
-
2. You meet a classmate who you don't really know in the common bathroom. There is only the two of you. This person used up all the hot water and you cannot take a shower. You feel angry and disappointed.
You say: …
This person responds: “And a very good morning to you too.”
([–P, +SD] situation)
-
3. You go to your grandparents' house. You sleep there, and in the morning you find them already eating breakfast with no food left for you. You feel angry and disappointed.
You say: …
Your grandfather responds: “And a very good morning to you too.”
([+P, –SD] situation)
-
4. You go to the PhD office in your university, after you hear that an administrator removed you from a course, without asking you at all. You feel angry and disappointed.
You say: …
The administrator responds: “And a very good morning to you too.”
([+P, +SD] situation)
We adopted this research design because our previous research (House & Kádár forthcoming) had revealed that in Chinese it is mainly the [+P, +SD] situation, and to a smaller degree the [+P, –SD] situation, which trigger the speech act Greet, while in other situations Chinese speakers frequent the phatic speech act remark in the opening of an interaction, hence the aforementioned weak relationship between phatic interaction and the speech act Greet in Chinese. In other words, the four situations in the task represent a broader spectrum of contexts than those in which phatic interaction conventionally necessitates Greet in Chinese. We did not reveal the goal of the experiment to our respondents. Following the completion of the above-outlined written production task, the respondents were asked to explain the reasons for providing their responses.
3.2 Outcome
Table 1 (see below) summarises the responses of our British respondents.
Choices of our British respondents
| Respondent | [−P, −SD] | [−P, +SD] | [+P, −SD] | [+P, +SD] |
| 1 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 3 | ✓ | ✓ | x | ✓ |
| 4 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 5 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 6 | ✓ | ✓ | x | ✓ |
| 7 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 8 | ✓ | ✓ | x | ✓ |
| 9 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 10 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
As Table 1 shows, nearly all our British respondents assessed the utterance ‘And a very good morning to you too’ as a realisation of a Complain. That is, they interpreted the context as essentially conflictive primarily because no phatic Greet occurs in the first turn where they felt it should have occurred. The directness of their conflictive utterances varied in all situations, as the following responses to the first [–P, –SD] task show:
| What the heck, mate, you are not ill at all. |
| Shouldn't you be in hospital right now? |
The first of these utterances is directly conflictive, while the response in (3) realises conflict more indirectly via irony. However, notwithstanding this difference, both respondents successfully recognised that something ‘odd’ must have been going on in the first turn, in order for the adjacent response to become a Complain about the lack of a Greet.
We only received three ‘inappropriate’ responses from the British participants in our written production task. All of them relate to the third situation. Here, our respondents provided speech act sequences, consisting of a Complain followed by a Greet, or the other way around:
| For heaven's sake, Grampa, why didn't you wait for me. Good morning anyway! (Complain→Greet) |
| Good morning! What am I supposed to eat now? |
| (Greet→Complain) |
As the follow up explanations provided by our respondents made clear, all of them felt that the emotional tie one normally has with one's grandparents necessitates some form of greeting. It is worth noting that even though we classified these responses as ‘inappropriate’, they might as well be appropriate because there is a Complain element realised either before or after the Greet, showcasing that these respondents also perceived that a conflict must be present in turn 1 of the interaction provided. As the following summary of choices of our Chinese respondents will show, even such so-called ‘inappropriate’ responses turn out to be legitimate in comparison to the types of recognition failures by the majority of our Chinese respondents.
The responses of our Chinese group were radically different from their British peers. As Table 2 shows, a large majority of our Chinese respondents were not able to recognise that the second responsive utterance in the task is simply meant to be a Complain about the lack of an occurrence of a Greet in the first turn, in spite of their very advanced level of English. That is, they very frequently provided a Greet expression in the empty line they were requested to fill in, even when they recognised that the second utterance in some way relates to something ‘inappropriate’ that happened in the first turn. Also, they rarely produced a Complain along with the Greet (see (4) and (5) above). The high rate of recognition failure on the part of our Chinese respondents relates to the fact that, in Chinese, the use of ‘proper’ Greet forms has only a weak relationship with phatic interaction, i.e. they apparently did not associate the conflict in turn 2 with a breach of phatic interaction per se.
Choices of our Chinese respondents
| Respondent | [−P, −SD] | [−P, +SD] | [+P, −SD] | [+P, +SD] |
| 1 | x | x | x | x |
| 2 | ✓ | ✓ | x | x |
| 3 | X | ✓ | ✓ | x |
| 4 | x | x | x | x |
| 5 | x | x | x | x |
| 6 | x | x | x | x |
| 7 | ✓ | ✓ | x | ✓ |
| 8 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 9 | ✓ | x | x | x |
| 10 | x | x | x | x |
In what follows, we present two of our Chinese subjects' responses to the [–P, –SD] task, followed by their explanations. The first one represents an appropriate response and the second one represents an inappropriate response.
| Oh that must be a completely good morning for you. |
| Explanation: In this situation, I might feel being fooled. Since this person is my friend, I may say ‘Oh, that must be a completely good morning for you’ to be ironic. This irony would show my feelings of anger and disappointment, while it would also help me to avoid further conflict owing to the indirect nature of how I speak. |
This respondent appropriately interpreted that the source of the responsive Complain in the second turn in the task was the lack of Greet in the first turn. The second respondent quoted below initially seemed to provide an appropriate utterance, hence performing better than various other respondents involved in our experiment. However, her subsequent explanation revealed that she misunderstood the situation presented in the task (7):
| I knew it! You've got to cover me next time. |
| Explanation: In this situation, I would feel angry and disappointed, and I would want the favour I made to my friend to be returned. This is why I would ask my friend to return my favour. |
As the explanation here shows, the utterance produced in the first turn one was meant to convey a relationally positive message in spite of the initial criticism (‘I knew it!’). Such a relationally positive message may not have the capacity to trigger a Complain in turn 2.
We can now proceed to answer our two research questions:
-
How do native speakers of English evaluate unconventional and unexpected non-phatic uses of greeting in English?
-
How do Chinese learners evaluate the same unconventional and unexpected non-phatic uses of greeting in English?
Regarding the first question, it is clear that for native speakers of English it is easy to recognise the source of Complain in the second turn in the tasks. This relates to the fact that Greet is ubiquitous in English, and so in the phatic Opening phase of an interaction its non-realisation is marked. As regards the second question, our Chinese respondents often struggled with interpreting what was going on in the tasks. This interpretative difficulty is, in our view, related to pragmatic transfer. More specifically, according to evidence from large Chinese corpora, fully-fledged realisations of the speech act Greet are not ‘compulsory’ in phatic Openings in certain interpersonal scenarios in the Chinese linguaculture. In such scenarios in particular, it is generally the speech act Remark which is associated with Opening in many interpersonal relationships (cf. our constructed example 1).
4 Conclusion
In this discussion note, we have first presented our pragmalinguistic, speech act-anchored and as such ‘hard-pragmatic’ approach to phatic language use. This approach is meant to be the common fundament for all the papers in our planned special issue in Acta Linguistica Academica. We have also presented a case study, in order to illustrate the intriguing pragmatic complexities of phatic interaction in different linguacultures. Such complexities make it worthwhile to explore phatic interaction from a pragmalinguistic point of view. We hope that this case study has provided a taster of the ways in which the framework proposed can be used in data analysis.
A key advantage of the approach proposed here is that it helps us to avoid essentialist overgeneralisations of culturally situated language use. When it comes to pragmatic phenomena such as phatic interaction, it may be appealing to describe members of certain linguacultures in overgeneralising and non-linguistic ways, alluding to ‘values’, ‘national traits’, ‘mentalities’ and so on. The problem with such descriptions is not only that they are non-linguistic, but also they shut the door on understanding issues that we touched on in this discussion note. For example, one may encounter arguments such as many Chinese ‘do not greet each other’ in the ‘Western’ sense – a stereotype which unfortunately recurs even in academic discourse (e.g. Ye 2007). While such an argument could explain why our Chinese respondents were unable to cope with the task we gave them, it would however be highly problematic because it would dismiss those cases when our respondents correctly resolved the task. Even more importantly, such an non-linguistic overgeneralisation would not help at all identifying those pragmatic phenomena which are responsible for the low rate of appropriate responses in the task we gave our Chinese respondents.
We believe that the forthcoming special issue will fill an important knowledge gap, considering the previously mentioned general lack of pragmalinguistic and speech act-anchored analyses in the study of phatic interaction. The issue will feature data drawn from many different typologically distant linguacultures, including for example German, Hungarian and Javanese. We hope that such linguistic diversity will open up new perspectives in the study of phatic language use.
Funding
Our research was funded by the the National Excellence Programme, National Research Subprogramme, funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary (TKP2021-NKTA-02), and the Research Grant of the National Research Development and Innovation Office, Hungary (132969), both hosted by the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics.
References
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana , Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper . 1989. Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Cohen, Andrew . 2008. Teaching and assessing L2 pragmatics: What can we expect from learners? Language Teaching 41(2). 213–235.
Coupland, Justine , Nicholas Coupland and Jeffrey D. Robinson . 1992. “How are you?”: Negotiating phatic communion. Language in Society 21(2). 207–230.
Edmondson, Willis and Juliane House . 2011. Let’s talk and talk about it: A pedagogic interactional grammar of English. Munich: Urban & Schwarzenberg.
Edmondson, Willis , Juliane House and Dániel Z. Kádár . 2022. A pedagogic interactional grammar of English: Expressions, speech acts and discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garfinkel, Harold . 1964. Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities. Social Problems 11(3). 225–250.
Goffman, Erving . 1971. Relations in public. New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions.
Holmes, Janet . 2010. Small talk at work: Potential problems for workers with an intellectual disability. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36(1). 65–84.
House, Juliane . 2011. Contrastive discourse analysis and misunderstanding: The case of German and English. In M. Hellinger and U. Ammon (eds.) Contrastive sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 345–362.
House, Juliane and Dániel Z. Kádár . Greeting in English as a foreign language. Under review in International Review of Applied Linguistics.
House, Juliane and Dániel Z. Kádár . 2022. Cross-cultural pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
House, Juliane and Dániel Z. Kádár . Forthcoming. Greeting in English as a foreign language – A problem for speakers of Chinese. Applied Linguistics.
Jaworski, Adam (ed.). 2014. Small talk. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Jucker, Andreas . 2011. Greetings and farewells in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In P. Pahta and A. Jucker (eds.) Communicating early English manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 229–240.
Kádár, Dániel Z. 2017. Politeness, impoliteness and ritual: Maintaining the moral order in interpersonal interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leech, Geoffrey . 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral gardens and their magic. London: Routledge.
McConarchy, Troy . 2019. L2 pragmatics as ‘intercultural pragmatics’: Probing sociopragmatic aspects of pragmatic awareness. Journal of Pragmatics 151. 167–176.
Nilsson, Jenny , Catrin Norrby , Love Bohman , Skogmyr Marian , Camilla Wide and Jan Lindströme . 2020. What is in a greeting? The social meaning of greetings in Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish service encounters. Journal of Pragmatics 168. 1–15.
Senft, Gunther . 2009. Phatic communion. In G. Senft , J.-O. Östman and J. Verschueren (eds.) Culture and language use. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 226–233.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen . 2005. (Im)politeness, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their bases and interrelationships. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1). 95–119.
Ye, Zhengdao . 2007. ‘La Double Vie de Veronica’: Reflections on my life as a Chinese migrant in Australia. Life Writing 1(1). 133–146.
Our Chinese data was sampled in parallel from two corpora: the Modern Chinese General Balanced Corpus and the Peking University Corpus. We relied on two Chinese corpora because each of them is smaller than their British English counterpart – the British National Corpus.
Note that our argument that phatic interaction has a relatively weaker relationship with Greet in Chinese than in English should not be confounded with the claim that Greet in Chinese or English has a weaker/stronger relationship with phatic interaction. This is an important difference, considering that normally any Greet realised in the opening of an interaction directly gains a phatic function, even though there are some exceptions to this (see House & Kádár forthcoming)
