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Proposal for a Phatic Glossary

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By Semiophrenic
A List of Keywords and List of Names would be two wonderful magical devices that could help us navigate into this area. (Joe)
This is a good idea. I've been considering doing something like it for my own blog for a while now because it's getting more and more difficult to navigate through all the clatter and clutter of phatic this and phatic that. My thought was to create a quasi-chronological listing of all sources that say something significant about phatics. I'm sure I'll get around to that when I've exhausted the materials I'm currently working on, but for our current paper I think a list of main terms could actually be useful.

Here's a preliminary list from the top of my head:
  • phatic communion (Malinowski)
  • phatic function (Jakobson)
  • phatic communication (La Barre)
  • phatic image (Virilio)
  • phatic text (Schandorf)
  • phatic negotiation (Coupland, Coupland & Robinson)
  • phatic interpretation (Žegarac & Clark)
  • phatic technology (Vetere et al., Wang et al.)
  • phatic labor (Elyachar)
  • phatic community construction (Blanco)
  • phatic culture (Miller)
This is by no means exhaustive list, but these come to mind first. The question now is: how deep should the list of keywords go, because almost all later authors invent a whose host of phatic sub-terminology, like phatic design, phatic technological habituation, etc. It can get pretty absurd, because phatic exchange and phatic talk are basically synonymous, just like various terms like phatic utterance and phatic statement.  Not to mention non-canonical terms like phatic act (Austin) and phasis (Wescott), which have been called out by a renowned scholars but whose interpretation of "phatic" almost no-one nowadays subscribes to.

Comments

  1. aridedOctober 15, 2015 at 12:52 AM

    We should make a similar round-up of the different phatic functions. Rasmus's initial proposal for a set of "multiplied" functions, after Jakobson, is summarized here: http://phatic-workshop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/phatic-x.html

    I wonder if my use of "conative" has drifted, since I've been using it to describe goal-like interactions, e.g. around a ROADMAP; but in that post it is about acquaintance and reputation. Are roadmaps and reputations linked, or has something here gone screwy? What about my proposed "introductory" and "imperfect" functions: would those fit with the Jakobson functions as special variant versions, or are they "new"?

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