Phatica 3.1.

Current plan:

1. Introduction

In the introduction, where we simultaneously demonstrate where we are, i.e. where we:

• Give a short overview of the strikingly complex history and etymology of the term "phatic"; [effectively a condensed version of chapter 2, where we treat what we want, which is a better understanding of phaticity]
• briefly describe the matter at hand, i.e. the phaticity in phatic communion, phatic communication, and phatic function; [condensed chapter 3, where we enter into the foreign territory of relevant literature and begin the exposition on the history of phatics]
• explain the demon of terminological invention and how Phatica has lead so many to coin new phaticisms; [condensed ch. 4, where we adapt to it by demonstrating the wide variety of terms by linking them together somehow, perhaps in light of the textual foundations]
• summarize the current situation by describing the trends that show most promise for future research; [con. ch. 5, where we get what we want, which is a better understanding of phaticity]
• list problems with current theories and definitions, i.e. inconsistencies in the general outlook or framework; [con. ch. 6, where we pay for by acknowledging not only the mistakes of the past but possible difficulties awaiting phatic studies in the future]
• inform the reader of the most general aspects of phaticity that are common to both classical authorities and new innovators, i.e. a general theory of phaticity that looks a lot like where we began; [con. ch. 7, where we return to a familiar situation of contemporary phatic studies and propose a sort of unified theory or perspective]
• conclude with our main findings; [condensed version of the conclusion, where we find that the familiar situation has changed, namely we now have a better understanding of what we're dealing with].

It's a good idea to write the introduction last, so the current introduction can remain an outline of what's to come until we've written the rest and can start condensing the chapters into paragraphs for the introduction.

2. Phaticity

Give a short overview of the strikingly complex history and etymology of the term "phatic".
Effectively a condensed version of chapter 2, where we treat what we want, which is a better understanding of phaticity.

Here I think we have a good beginning with the paraphrased version of the text in Manuscriptorium, which you sent me on Feb 2. I altered it slightly but the core remains the same. We'll probably have to change, add, and retract much but this seems like a good place to start advancing the narrative.

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The term "phatic" has a strikingly complex history. When Bronisław Malinowski came up with the idea of "phatic communion" in the early 1920s, he aimed to describe the communion achieved through speaking alone. Following him, Weston La Barre was the first to treat "phatic communication" explicitly, and Roman Jakobson popularized the concept of the "phatic function", not to mention further variants invented during the ensuing decades.

In this paper we trace the complexity of "phatics", try our best to unite the manifold colorful threads within the framework of "phaticity", and propose a new disciplinary approach that we call "phatic studies". Phatics have been of interest in various research areas touching on the field of communication but the term has become particularly popular in the beginning of the current century. It seems to be high time to give a name to "phatic studies",
which already exists in a diffuse form.

While there is an intuitive simplicity and familiarity to phatics to many linguists, literary, communication, and social media theorists, a fundamental challenge for phatic studies is to bring a degree of consistency to the term’s diverse usage. In practice the term "phatic" may be assigned a specific technical meaning, or may inherent multiple meanings, or may even be used as an open signifier with any and all meanings.

We find that there are three major lineages in the scholarly tradition dealing with phatic communion, phatic communication, and the phatic function of speech, stemming from Malinowski, La Barre, and Jakobson, respectively. The situation gets much more complex and navigation becomes more difficult after John Laver's overview of the communicative functions of phatic communion, which associates phatic communion with the concept of "relationship", and even more so after the Couplands, who treated small talk and relationship goals under the guise of phatic communion, associating it with "relationship goals".

In the literature surveyed for this review, we are dealing not only with a plurality of definitions, but with entirely different levels of abstraction. In order to adapt to this situation it becomes necessary to construct a conception of "phaticity" that can aid investigating the phatic integration between different levels of abstraction from intrapersonal to social. Therefore, we introduce the concept phaticity with the specific purpose of drawing together several implicitly related theoretical concepts from different registers pertaining to different levels.

Thinking across these related concepts, we are drawn to the conclusion that phaticity is an irrevocable component in the production of the social system. In order to understand what this means, we can build the theory up by looking first at the features of the communication situation that pertain to interpersonal integration, proceeding to group, organizational, and institutional integration, and finally to the integration of these within a society.

With this meta-review the authors hope to concretize the domain of phatic studies and provide it with a solid theoretical and empirical foundation. A meta-scientific corollary of this perspective is that further research should aim towards the integration of theoretical foundations and research results to achieve a mutually comprehensive framework for filling in the gaping white spots in our current knowledge.

3. The phatic function of communi(cati)on

Briefly describe the matter at hand, i.e. the phaticity in phatic communion, phatic communication, and phatic function.
Effectively a condensed version of chapter 3, where we enter into the foreign territory of relevant literature and begin the exposition on the history of phatics.

I now realize that the previous chapter as it currently stands is actually a previous version of the outline, just like the introduction is essentially a newer version of the same outline. It turns out that Dan Harmon's clockwise circle can also occur within each of the eight points. Somehow it feels natural that it should do so, but I wouldn't impose it on every subchapter because it may become restrictive. I'll later try to organize the discourse on textual foundations the same way, but for now I attempted to compare the textual foundations and elucidate the characteristics of phatic communion, communication, and function from citations. I'm currently elaborating it further by adding extra developments as bullet points into each cell.

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	Malinowski's phatic communion	La Barre's phatic communication	Jakobson's phatic function
What it characterizes	"language used in free, aimless, social intercourse"	inter-communication through vocalizations	the set of linguistic messages operating upon contact
What it does	"serves to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas", and serves "the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or other"	"communicates a generalized emotional tone through the band so that all its members come to have the same attitude toward a situation"	serves to start, "to establish, [to sustain,] to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works", "to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention"
Semantic emptiness	"Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning, the meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not!" and "language does not function here as a means of transmission of thought"	"it is at least a "pseudo-language," if we are careful to define what we mean by this" because "we feel communication has taken place when it has not"	"prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication"
Illustrative situations	talking while sitting together at a village fire, chatting on a work break, gossip during work, European drawing-room conversation	"the acute phatic prescience of a mother when her child is concerned", "the phatic closeness of lovers", "phatic nudges, pats, punches, pawing, and verbal face-making" at parties, "a constant companion like a college room-mate"	(telephone) conversation, inter-locution, dialogue
Relation to infancy	"But can we regard it as a mode of action?", implying that the organic language of infants is primarily phatic because it's an action language, i.e. a pseudo-language	"close emotional concern, endlessly repeated contexts, the infant's idiosyncracies of expression, and the mother's own organic reception all give her a large and continuing intelligence about the child"	"the first verbal function acquired by infants"
Estimation of prevalence	"I should like to add at once that though the examples discussed were taken from savage life, we would find among ourselves exact parallels to every type of linguistic use so far discussed"	"a quite surprising amount of human communication", particularly "political, diplomatic, economic, social, theological, philosophical, aesthetic, and amatory", "remains strictly phatic, for all its employment of articulate words" and "pretenses at semantic respectability"	presumably prevalent enough to merit a discrimination of phatic code and function (as Whiteley pointed out, and as Reiss problematized)
Relationship to referential context	"Language here is not dependent upon what happens at that moment, it seems to be even deprived of any context of situation", and "the outer situation does not enter directly into the technique of speaking"	does not convey "detailed information about the structure of the universe"	presumably the referential function lapses in greetings (according to Ogden & Richards)
Evaluative aspect	"affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things", "or personal accounts of the speaker's views and life history"	"expressions of vague notions or awareness of agreeable, disagreeable, or dangerous situations and events", "commenting on the infinitely varied passing world"	"Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said.""
Sociability	"the function of Speech in mere sociabilities" is "one of the bedrock aspects of man's nature in society", "the mere presence of others [is] a necessity for man"	"is behind the possibility of even phatic communication among them"	the phatic function is "the only one" that other social species, such as parrots, have in common "with human beings"
What sociability achieves	"atmosphere of sociability", "a pleasant atmosphere of polite, social intercourse"	phatic conversations "set and maintain the relaxed emotional tone of the group"	presumably continuing, sustaining, and prolonging communication
Remarks about weather	"comments on weather" such as "'Nice day to-day" become "the binding tissue of words which unites the crew of a ship in bad weather"	"an exchange of polite opinions about the weather between two thoroughly sober people [does not have] any real concern with or bearing upon current or proximate meteorological events: in this, people are taking the temperature and assessing the humidity of the inter-individual weather, not the earthly"	"a limited set of stereotyped phrases of greeting, parting, commonplace remarks about the weather" (Laver 1975: 218) "in salutations, in small-talk about the weather and the like, we observe that people tend to use stereotypical forms of expression" (Nord 2007: 173)
Relation to action and intention	"The meaning of any utterance cannot be connected with the speaker's or hearer's behaviour, with the purpose of what they are doing", "not in this case to connect people in action"	"sometimes it binds the group to biologically useful common action", it "is at least a kind of social hormone, to communicate emotion and to unify band action", it allows to foresee the actions of fellows, "this mutual vocal abuse is a symbolic substitute for action, a statement in inter-band diplomacy which has much the same function as a politico-economic treatise establishing historic legal title to territories"	"For talking birds, however, as their student Mowrer [1950] noted, vocalization is primarily a means of getting their human partner to continue communication with them and to give in fact no sign of parting." (Jakobson 1981[1964e]: 9)
Propitiation	"another man's silence is not a reassuring factor, but, on the contrary, something alarming and dangerous"	"nothing is more infuriating to some people than a spouse who does not keep up even a reasonably intermittent flow of phatic reply, but holds to an unpermitted and thoroughly suspect emotional privacy"	"to check whether the channel works ("Hello, do you hear me?")"
In-group / out-group distinction	"The stranger who cannot speak the language is to all savage tribesmen a natural enemy"	"the conversation of human adolescents [...] consists, almost exclusively, in such group-conformity-making pejoratives, encomiastics, and intensificatives", since "often new sub-languages or argots arise among secretive ingroups like criminals, adolescents, and others with their own special libidinal ties", this also "asserts a claim of territorialism"	"messages primarily serving to establish [...] communication" must be known beforehand
Friendship bonding	"the communion of words is the first act to establish links of fellowship", phatic expressions "are needed to get over the strange and unpleasant tension which men feel when facing each other in silence"	"long-continued, stable, and intense emotional ties for the repeated experience of contexts by the same particular individuals" are necessary for development of language, as "no doubt the speech of proto-humans was still largely phatic in nature"	presumably friend- and fellowship influence the length of communication and the use of phatic language
Affirmation and consent	"always the same emphasis on affirmation and consent"	"extremely close organic-phatic libidinal ties, to bring about the blandly accepted, the multiple taken-for-granted agreements which inhere in and make up all arbitrary semantic communication"	"and on the other end of the wire "Um-hum!""
Impatience	"the hearer listens under some restraint and with slightly veiled impatience, waiting till his own turn arrives to speak"	"communicating or seeking to induce merely an endocrine state, emotional state, or manipulable "state of mind""	"and on the other end of the wire "Um-hum!"" (again)
Attention	"in this use of speech the bonds created between hearer and speaker are not quite symmetrical, the man linguistically active receiving the greater share of social pleasure and self-enhancement"	white-cheeked gibbon has four types of expressive vocalizations that can be roughly be translated into human speech as "hmmm", communicating non-committal attention	"to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention"
The situation	"the situation in all such cases is created by the exchange of words, by the specific feelings which form convivial gregariousness", "the whole situation consists in what happens linguistically"	"constant association alone, with the only feeble emotional ties, can commonly carry the burden of much new phatic context", "learned habitual and familiar situations become more and more burdened by common memory of specific contexts, more and more colored by individual personal idiosyncracy, and richer and richer in private emotional connotation"	"a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication" (Jakobson 1985[1976c]: 113)
Linguistic subcode	"formulae of greeting or approach"	"one can convey incredible amounts of meaning and evoke large constellations of understanding merely by a breath noise, a certainly more than "non-committal" grunt, a lifted eyebrow, a modulated cough, or a minimal body movement"	"a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication"
Congeniality with  communization	"links of fellowship" are "consummated only by the breaking of bread and the communion of food" (Morris's version)	"who has attended the same classes, read the same books, seen the same entertainments, and knows the same people" (Ruesch's version)	the phatic function can operate in hypersemiotic communication (Fiordo's version)
Relation to phatic acts	the formulae of greeting and approach can be multilingual, i.e. verbal acts	"phatic communication precedes the semantic" and it primarily involves vocalizations, i.e. vocal acts	can be reduced to attention drawn by body sound communication, i.e. strepital acts

I think I could write a paragraph or few about each row in this table, and possible add something from newer phatic studies in chapter 4, i.e.

4. The study of phaticity

Explain the demon of terminological invention and how Phatica has lead so many to coin new phaticisms.
Effectively a condensed version of chapter 4, where we adapt to it by demonstrating the wide variety of terms by linking them together somehow, perhaps in light of the textual foundations.