3.1 Methodology

In Edmondson & House (1981) and Edmondson, House & Kádár (2023), Small Talk is defined as a type of Core Talk, which triggers a cluster of conventionalised speech acts. Figure 1 displays the system of Types of Talk.

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Types of talk (adapted from Edmondson & House 1981, 199)

Citation: Acta Linguistica Academica 70, 4; 10.1556/2062.2023.00702

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As Figure 1 shows, Small Talk does not usually occur in the Opening and Closing phases of an interaction. Although both Opening and Closing, as well as Small Talk are ritual in nature, the Opening and Closing phases follow an interactional structure which triggers ritual behaviour, i.e. they tend to be realised by speech acts which are seemingly not meaningful but have an important symbolic interactional function (see more in House & Kádár 2023). Small Talk, on the other hand, is a Type of Talk which is not structurally ritual but rather gains a ritual character in interaction,¹ i.e. it is realised in interaction according to conventions through which the participants work out and manage their relationships. In Core Talk, switches can occur between Small Talk and other Types of Talk such as Business Talk. For example, interactants engaged in Business Talk may temporarily switch to Small Talk in order to relieve the tension of a busy meeting.

The speech acts included in the Small Talk definition above can be defined as follows:

1. -Remark: A typically Phatic speech act through which the speaker shows himself favourably disposed towards his addressee.
2. -Tell: An Informative speech which states a piece of information in a matter-of-fact tone.
3. -Opine: An Informative speech act which states a piece of information as the opinion of the speaker.
4. -Disclose: This speech act essentially gives biographical information, such that through this information the addressee ‘gets to know one better’.

While Small Talk typically enacted through the above-outlined limited set of speech acts, the use of these particular speech acts only represents a default situation. That is, the speech acts through which Small Talk is realised is subject to both contextual and linguacultural variation. Edmondson & House (1981), and Edmondson, House & Kádár (2023) propose the following radically minimal, finite and interactional typology of speech acts through which we aim to investigate which speech act types are realised in our English and Chinese datasets (Figure 2).

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Our speech act typology (Edmondson & House 1981; Edmondson, House & Kádár 2023)

Citation: Acta Linguistica Academica 70, 4; 10.1556/2062.2023.00702

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This typology of speech acts is interactional in two respects. First, using this typology one always interprets an utterance as a particular speech act by considering its relationship to the previous and following turns of talk in a particular context. Second, this typology affords an interaction interpretation of a speech act in a particular interactional slot, by taking account of what we call ‘altered’ interactional uses of speech acts (see also House & Kádár 2021b). For example, Request is a typically Attitudinal speech act, which by default is not a speech act which could be assumed to characterise Small Talk. However, as our case study will show, there are situations where Requests tend to be frequented in Small Talk in order to create rapport with the interlocutor, and our system allows the analysis of such case by only setting a default function of speech acts.

3.2 Data

In the analysis presented in this paper, we employed DCTs with two groups of ten respondents: one group included native U.S. speakers of English and the other group native speakers of Chinese from the Northeast of China. We presented the following three DCT sets to our respondents:

First DCT set

1. You are sitting in a doctor's waiting room and your friend sits next to you. Only the two of you are in the room. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [–P,–SD]

2. You are sitting in a doctor's waiting room and your friend's friend sits next to you. Only the two of you are in the room. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [–P,+SD]

3. You are sitting in a doctor's waiting room and your teacher sits next to you. Only the two of you are in the room. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [+P,–SD]

4. You are sitting in a doctor's waiting room and a professor you distinctly know sits next to you. Only the two of you are in the room. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [+P,+SD]

Second DCT set

1. You are sitting in a bus stop, waying for a bus, and your friend sits next to you. There are many people next to you, so what you are saying can be overheard. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [–P,–SD]

2. You are sitting in a bus stop, waying for a bus, and your friend's friend sits next to you. There are many people next to you, so what you are saying can be overheard. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [–P,+SD]

3. You are sitting in a bus stop, waying for a bus, and your teacher sits next to you. There are many people next to you, so what you are saying can be overheard. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [+P,–SD]

4. You are sitting in a bus stop, waying for a bus, and a professor you distinctly know sits next to you. You feel you should say something. There are many people next to you, so what you are saying can be overheard. What would you say? [+P,+SD]

Third DCT set

1. You are participating in an English course and the foreign lecturer is not coming. Your best friend is sitting next to you and others you know are already around who may hear what you say. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [–P,–SD]

2. You are participating in an English course and the foreign lecturer is not coming. Your friend's friend is sitting next to you and others you know are already around who may hear what you say. You feel you should say something. What would you say? [–P,+SD]

3. You are participating in an English course and the foreign lecturer is not coming. Your supervisor was asked to join this event and she is sitting next to you and others you know are already around who may hear what you say. You feel you should say something because the professor looks idle and wishing you to say something. What would you say? [+P,–SD]

4. You are participating in an English course and the foreign lecturer is not coming. A professor whom you slightly know was asked to join this event and she is sitting next to you, while others you know are already around who may hear what you say. You feel you should say something because the professor looks idle and wishing you to say something. What would you say? [+P,+SD]

In the DCTs, we used the standard sociolinguistic parameters Social Distance and Power [+/–SD,+/–P]. In pragmatics, it was the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (SSCARP) (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper 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 study we rely on the basic [+/–SD,+/–P] variables because we are interested in the contrastive question whether these major variables trigger any replicable pragmatic differences between Small Talk in English and Chinese.

The above-outlined DCTs centre on three different scenarios with an increase sense of out of the ordinary. As part of our investigation, we pursued particular interest in how speakers of English and Chinese cope with increasingly extraordinary situations in terms of Small Talk. Arguably, DCT 1, 2 and 3 represent different degrees of the extraordinary on a pragmatic scale (Leech 1983). Further, all the above DCT scenarios feature vague situation descriptions where the interactants are already physically close to each other when Small Talk occurs, instead of meeting abruptly. By providing such vague descriptions, our goal was to prompt our respondents to provide speech acts which they associated with Small Talk rather than Opening, even though the scenarios featured in the DCTs may also involve interactional Opening. This design allowed us to investigate if and when speakers of English and Chinese engage in Opening Talk before moving to Small Talk in the settings presented to them.

4.1 English DCTs conducted with English-speaking participants

Table 1 summarises the frequency of various speech acts in our first DCT featuring a doctor's waiting room.

As the table shows, the most frequent speech acts in our first DCT conducted with English-speaking participants are Greet and How-are-you. The frequency of these speech acts is not surprising: as we argued elsewhere (House et al. 2022), speakers of English tend to utter the speech act Greet in routinised interactions, often in combination with the speech acts How-are-you and Welcome. Considering that in our DCT scenario the interactants accidentally meet, realising Greet + speech act combinations is clearly in line with a broader Anglophone convention. The following examples illustrate such speech act combinations are realised in our data:

From the point of view of Small Talk, the Phatic speech act Remark is of particular relevance here: according to our observation, participants tend to realise trivial Remarks – often stating the obvious – in order to achieve rapport with their interactants. The following examples illustrate the use of Remarks in the four interpersonal scenarios in our first DCT:

In our interpretation, the frequency of Remarks correlates with the [+P] variable. We interpret this tendency as an outcome of a greater need to overcome embarrassment when someone meets an interactant with power.

The speech act Request (for information) is frequented in the [–P] scenarios. The following examples illustrate its use:

As these examples show, such Requests aim to create rapport. It is interesting to note that in example (9) the Request (for information) “What are you here for” could even be interpreted as a How-are-you in the particular setting of a doctor's waiting room – i.e. such Requests tend to have a clear rapport-triggering function, as the lead to the realisation of the speech act Disclose on the recipient's part. The fact that such Requests (unlike more routinised How-are-you) here occur in the [–P] scenarios suggests that in power-relationships realising utterances like example (10) might be interpreted as intrusive and overstepping the line of Small Talk.

Disclose is another speech act which tends to be freuented in the [–P] scenarios. According to Edmondson & House (1981, 173), “[a] Disclose essentially gives biographical information, such that through this information the hearer ‘knows one better’.” The following example illustrates realisations of Disclose in our data:

The speech acts Opine and Suggest occur very rarely in the first DCT, so we do not discuss them here.

Table 2 summarises the frequency of various speech acts in our second DCT featuring a doctor's waiting room.

The speech act Greet and its combinations with How-are-you and Welcome are similarly routinised with what we could observe in the first set of English DCTs. What slightly differs in this DCT set is that the speech act Request (for information) tends to be realised in all interpersonal relationships. The following examples illustrate its use:

The reason why such Requests occur in [+P] scenarios in this DCT set may be that inquiring about the other in a bus stop is far less intrusive as doing the same in a doctor's waiting room, i.e. the Request can contribute to the enhancement of rapport also in [+P] relationships. However, the fact that such Requests are more preferred in [–P] settings shows that they may nevertheless be perceived as face-threatening.

It is also worth referring to realisations of Disclose in this dataset due to their relative frequency:

Reflecting on various realisations of Disclose in examples (11), (12), (17) and (18), we can argue that in [+SD] settings Disclose operates as a self-identification, while in [–SD] settings it fulfils other functions, like reflecting on the speaker's mindset.

Considering that Remark, Willing (Offer) and Tell/Opine are infrequent in this DCT set, we do not reflect on them here.

Table 3 summarises the frequency of various speech acts in our third DCT featuring a classroom.

As the table shows, unlike in the other two scenarios, in the third DCT setting the speech act Greet – including Greet and How-are-you and/or Welcome combinations – are relatively rare. Instead, the most frequent speech act is Request (for information). The following examples show the use of this speech act in the four different interpersonal scenarios:

In our view, the frequency of the speech act Request (for information) can be explained through the nature of the situation where something extraordinary happens. That is, in such a scenario, many language users apparently start to relate Small Talk to the extraordinary scene. Thus, such Requests (for information) which normally belong to Business Talk are by default not Phatic in nature, i.e. they ‘migrate’ (House & Kádár 2021b) into a Phatic role. The reason why such a migration is not happening in the previous DCT scenario featuring a bus stop is that busses are not common to be late, i.e. the bus stop scene does not represent the realm of extraordinary from the participants' point of view.

A relevant point to note is that the out of the ordinary scene also triggers various Remarks which are realised as quasi-Requests for information, as the following examples show:

The reason why we interpreted such utterances as Remarks rather than Requests (for information) is that in such cases the speaker realises rhetorical questions with a clear Phatic interactional goal. Not all Remarks are formulated in this way in our data, as the following example illustrates:

The sense of the extraordinary also influences the way in which the speech acts Greet and How-are-you are realised in this setting: they are not used on their own, unlike in the other two DCT sets, but rather they co-occur with either Requests (for information) or Remarks. The following examples illustrate this tendency:

A noteworthy speech act in the present DCT set is Apologise, which according to Table 3 above is frequent in [+P] scenarios. The following examples illustrate its use:

The reason why our participants used Apologise in such settings is probably not that they felt responsible for a scenario they had no control over, but rather that apologising helped them to create a common ground with the lecturer, hence initiating Small Talk. Because of this, we believe that here once again one can witness a ‘migrated’ speech act: while according to Edmondson & House (1981) Apologise is an Attitudinal (past-related) speech act, here it gains a clear Phatic role and loses from its Apologise function.

4.2 DCTs conducted with Chinese-speaking participants

Table 4 summarises the frequency of various speech acts in our first DCT featuring a doctor's waiting room.

As the table shows, Remark is by far the most frequently used speech act in this set of DCTs. The following examples illustrate the realisation of this speech act in the four interpersonal scenarios:

What these examples and the overall frequency of this speech act show is that speakers of Chinese tend to disprefer routinised solutions in this setting and rather refer the situation enveloping the participants (see also House 2006). Some of the Remarks in the present DCT set are not only banal but also border on the ‘intrusive’ from a culture-outsider point of view, as example (34) shows. All such ‘intrusive’ cases include Remarks which are very close to the speech act How-are-you, but which do not transform into a real How-are-you because they do not take the form of an inquiry about the other's wellbeing. We believe that such instances of language use are not ‘intrusive’ from a culture-insider perspective – rather, they are ritual utterances through which rapport is created with the interlocutor. This interpretation is also supported by the fact that in various [+P] utterances our participants realised the speech act Request (for information) in similarly ‘intrusive’ ritual ways, as the following example shows:

While in our pragmalinguistic research we do not consider ideologies and other grand notions, it is worth here to refer to the study of Kádár (2016) where he argued that (Neo-)Confucian ideological influence may be captured in Chinese language use if one looks at pragmatic realisation patterns in data, instead of assuming that such ideologies influence language use. Indeed, what is likely to happen in such utterances is that ‘intrusive’ ritual inquiries are not only tolerated but endorsed in a student–teacher relationship where the student is supposed to ‘take care’ of the teacher like a child taking care of their parents.

The second most frequent speech in the present set of DCTs is Greet. One quantitative feature of this speech act which immediately catches one's eye is that it is not ubiquitous unlike in English, and it rarely co-occurs with How-are-you-s, and there is not Greet + Welcome combination. The following examples illustrate uses of Greet in the present DCT set:

The to Such non-ubiquity of Greet is not surprising: in House et al. (2022) we argued that unlike in many ‘Western’ linguacultures Greet is not ‘compulsory’ in Chinese. What is more surprising, however, that apart from the [+P,+SD] scenario our participants practically always Greet the other by using code-switching, e.g. through the form Hai 嗨 (for ‘hi’), obviously borrowed from English. We interpret this code-switching as motivated by the need to use a routinised expression which is in-between using a formal Greet form and simply Alerting the other to one's presence, which is shown by the following example:

Another relatively frequent speech act in this set of DCTs is Request (for information). As the following example shows, this speech act is realised in the form of general questions, making it close to a Remark:

We do not analyse the rest of the speech acts in Table 4 above due to their low frequency. Table 5 summarises the frequency of various speech acts in our second DCT featuring a bus stop.

Once again, Remark is the most frequent speech act – in fact, it is so frequent that in the [–P,+SD] setting it occurs more than one time in different utterances. The following examples show realisations of this speech act:

Similar to what we could witness in the previous DCT set, Remark is bound to the situation, hence the monotonous nature of the Remark relaisations here. Also, similar to example (38) above, some Remarks masquerade as Requests (for information), such as the second Remark in example (45), but they are not actual Requests because they are asking the obvious. The above examples also show that the speech act Greet mainly becomes important (if at all) in [+P] settings.

As Table 5 above shows, there are some real Requests (for information) in the present dataset. They nearly all include cases which are near-Remarks but which we did not categorise as Remark because they ask for real information, as in the following case:

The only exception is the following utterance:

The frequency of ‘near-Remark’ Requests (for information) shows that this setting tends to trigger Remark for speakers of Chinese. A related point to note is that Remark in this dataset takes many forms, such as quasi-Congratulates, as in the following utterance:

Such Remarks relate to the previously mentioned notion of the (Neo-)Confucian enactment of ‘intrusive’ respect and concern: the participant made a complimentary Remark to the recipient in a setting which may not require an outburst of respect from a culture-outsider point of view. It is very likely, however, that from a culture-insider point of view this repeated Remark is ritual as a quasi-Remark through which the waiting situation can be better endured.

We do not analyse the rest of the speech acts in Table 5 above due to their low frequency.

Table 6 summarises the frequency of various speech acts in our third DCT featuring a classroom.

Notwithstanding the relatively surprising nature of the absence of a lecturer, there are relatively few genuine Requests (for information) in the present Chinese DCT set – rather, our participants realised many Remarks, although some of these Remarks were cloaked as Requests (for information). Consider the following examples:

As all these examples show, the extraordinary nature of the situation triggers Remarks which take the form of a Request (for information) but cannot become real Requests simply because they are rhetorical. It is worth noting that not all Remarks are formulated in this way in our DCT set, as the following examples show:

Along with Remark, a speech act in this dataset deserving attention is Request (for information/to-do-x), illustrated by the following examples:

What is noteworthy about all these Requests is that they do not concern the immediate (extraordinary) context, but rather they relate to other activities of the respondent.

4.3 Contrastive analysis

To sum up our analysis of the three English DCT sets, it is clear that by default speakers of English frequent the speech acts Greet, How-are-you and Welcome in situations that trigger Small Talk. In certain situations, English respondents may not even directly venture to ‘Small Talk proper’ but rather realise speech acts such as Greet, How-are-you and Welcome, representing Opening Talk, even though it is clear that such speech acts trigger Small Talk in turn. While this pragmatic tendency fits with our previous findings relating to the ubiquity of Greet in Anglophone linguacultures (House et al. 2022), our research has shown that with the increasingly extraordinary character of a situation this ubiquity of Greet – and conventional Opening Talk in a broader sense – disappears. The analysis of the third DCT scenario has shown that as soon as speakers of English engage in Small Talk in clearly extraordinary situations, they get out of their routine and tend to initiate Small Talk with Requests (for information).

Our study of the three Chinese DCT sets has shown that Remark is by far the most frequent speech act in Chinese Small Talk, and also that speakers of Chinese rarely engage in ritual Opening Talk as far as our data is concerned. The ubiquity of Remark in Chinese does not change even in extraordinary scenarios, which shows that – unlike Greet (and Greet + How-are-you/+Welcome combinations) – seems to be pragmatically ‘compulsory’ for speakers of Chinese. As our DCT data has shown, even the speech act Request (for information) is often formulated as a ‘quasi-Remark’, which further points to the linguacultural importance of Remark in Chinese Small Talk.

These contrastive pragmatic differences point to the overall routinised nature of Small Talk in English, which is in stark contrast with how Small Talk operates in Chinese. Simply put, speakers of English apparently tend to resort to a standard routinised solution in ordinary settings, which also leads to a certain sense of conciseness of Small Talk utterances in the English data (see e.g. Remarks in English). The fact that Chinese Small Talk largely resorts to the immediate situation through Remarks leads to a certain ‘verbosity’ in comparison to the English data. The routinised character of English Small Talk versus Small Talk in Chinese accords with what House (2006) has found about the differences between English and German discourse practices.

Another contrastive finding which is worth noting here is the following. As our analysis has shown, Requests (for information) tend to be frequented in the English data, but they tend to be used in [–P] settings only. This shows that speakers of English tend to shy away from inquiring about the other's personal information in more formal relationships where they instead tend to use Remarks, Discloses and other speech acts (if at all), along with Greets. In Chinese, on the other and, the use of Requests (for information) is not confined to [–P] settings because these Requests tend to be realised as ritual ones, often in a (Neo-)Confucian way.

Let us revisit here the two areas of particular interest which we mentioned in Section 3.2 above:

1. -Do the [+/–SD,+/–P] trigger any replicable pragmatic differences between Small Talk in English and Chinese?
2. -How do speakers of English and Chinese cope with increasingly extraordinary situations in terms of Small Talk?

Regarding the first of these points of interest, our analysis has shown that the [+/–SD,+/–P] variables are important in both the English and Chinese data sets, i.e. one cannot oversimplify Small Talk in English and Chinese by resorting to intercultural arguments, such as that the Chinese is a so-called ‘power-oriented culture’. What we have been able to find, however, is that these variables influence English and Chinese Small Talk in different ways. These not only include seemingly ‘intrusive’ Chinese Requests for information in [+P] settings (see above), but also for example the presence of the speech act Remark – a ubiquitous speech act in Chinese – only in the [+P] scenario in the English DCTs. As regards the second point of interest, studying increasingly extraordinary situations has revealed the above-outlined difference between Chinese and English: while speakers of Chinese prefer Remarks irrespective of the nature of the context as far as Small Talk is concerned, speakers of English cease to follow routines of Small Talk in extraordinary contexts.