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phatic-x

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I would argue that reputation, information and emotion constitute only half the story. Combining the phatic function in Jakobson's scheme with other functions we get: (1) phatic-emotive - meaning shared emotions or attitudes; (2) phatic-referential - shared frame of reference, cognition and information; (3) phatic-conative - shared acquaintances and reputation of those acquaintances; (4) phatic-metalingual - shared code, force unifiante or equalization in terms of language; and (5) phatic-poetic - shared messages like mass media, books, music, etc.  I'm not quite sure about the last two combinations and god only knows what would be phatic-phatic, but at least the first three seem concrete enough (perhaps these are the only ones necessary, as affect, cognition and conation were the original triad).--soul searching: phatic labor post
(Just for the record there it is, but we can discuss further.)

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  1. SemiophrenicOctober 10, 2014 at 9:46 AM

    Sorry, my mind didn't connect the expression "phatic-x layers" and this aspect at all. Now I get what you mean: it's like I'm multiplying the phatic function with all the other functions. I'm not sure if they're layers, but this is definitely something I'm going to write about (I already have scattered remarks here and there). The outcome would be a very Jakobsonian typology of phatic phenomena. It's an often ignored pivot of his scheme of language functions that few speech acts have a purely this or that function. In actual fact all components are present in any act of (verbal) communication and manifest a differential hierarchy of functions. A typology like that is a shot in the dark, with no guarantee that it would lead to anything, but it's something I have to do in order to demonstrate that "the purely phatic stratum" as Jakobson would put it, may indeed be about conventional politeness formulas, but that there's a whole world of phatic phenomena that are ignored because of this restrictive definition.

    Since I'm planning to write about it anyway, maybe you can give your opinion of it. I'm quite interested in how framing these relations / multiplications / types of phenomena / whatever as layers could be useful for. I was confused about your reference because I ctrl+F'd my blog for both "phatic-x" and "layers" but didn't find anything. It is a cool label, though.

    This piece of theory is important for my purposes because while phatic communion, metacommunication, communization, the μ-function, etc all have slightly different orientations towards any of the other components (sender, receiver, code, message, referent), I'd thought this typology or (what will in the end be a) table of communication phenomena with a dominant phatic function, could re-group some of those aspects in a sensible way, so as to paint a broad picture of where to look for phatics.

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