On the Phatic Interpretation of Utterances: a Complementary Relevance-Theoretic Proposal

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 18 (2005): 227-246 On the Phatic Interpretation of Utterances: A Complementary Relevance-Theoretic Proposal Manuel Padilla Cruz University of Seville mpadillacruz@us. es ABSTRACT In this paper, I suggest a theoretical approach to the production and interpretation of phatic utterances aimed at complementing other previous accounts. These argüe that utterances are normally interpreted as phatic either because of their occurrence in particular conversational phases forming fixed adjacency pairs with other utterances, or because interlocutors actívate specific frames and process them in a particular way. Besides, the extant relevancetheoretic (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995) analysis of these utterances has focused on the linguistic properties that make utterances be interpreted as phatic, but has not explained how a speaker has to produce an utterance so that the hearer interprets it as phatic and why phatic utterances contribute to the creation of a feeling of solidarity and ties of unión between interlocutors.. 1. Introduction Since the anthropologist Bronislaw K. Malinowski (1923) described phatic utterances, little advance has been made in the study of them and their communicative functions, for some authors limited their contributions to repeating his ideas without further elaboration or offered a very negative characterisation of them. On the contrary, others tried to go beyond these works and explain the reasons why individuáis interpret some utterances as phatic. Thus, some conversation analysts have shown that this is due to the stractural properties of some utterances and their occurrence with others in very specific conversational phases, while some pragmaticians have maintained that the activation of some knowledge structures 228 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses and the way in which individuáis process them condition their interpretation. More recently, within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995), other pragmaticians (Zegarac, 1998; Zegarac and Clark, 1999a) have suggested an alternative approach, according to which interlocutors interpretutterances as phatic if the information that they convey does not satisfy specifíc expectations of obtaining a certain informative benefit. However, these works have not accounted for the cognitive operations that speaker and hearer have to perform in order to produce and interpret respectively a phatic utterance, ñor why phatic utterances contribute to the creation of a feeling of solidarity and ties of unión between interlocutors. Therefore, in this paper I will try to offer a complementary proposal based on a more general analysis of phatic utterances that I have developed over the last few years (Padilla Cruz, 2004a)1. In order to do so, firstly, I introduce some of the different perspectives on phatic utterances, starting with Malinowski's (1923) work. Secondly, I review the two groups of explanations about why individuáis interpretutterances as phatic. Then, I introduce the extant analysis of phatic utterances based on the pragmatic paradigm of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995) by Zegarac (1998) and Zegarac and Clark (1999a). Finally, I present the complementary proposal that I have developed which is also based on Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986,1995) and the notions of metarepresentation (e.g. Sperber, 1994) and metarepresentational uses of utterances (Noh, 2000). I would like to underline that this is a theoretical proposal, as I agree with Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995: 278-279, 1987, 1997: 148-149) that oneof the aimsof research in pragmatics must be to formúlate convincing hypotheses about linguistic production and comprehension, centred on the mental processes that interlocutors carry out, and which should then empirically tested and verified in subsequent work. 2. Phatic utterances When studying the linguistic behaviour of some Melanesian and Oceanic tribes, Malinowski (1923) observed narrative episodes which were not used to convey new and unknown information but were employed as a means of social interaction with a predominantly emotive function. This author czWeáphatic communion "[...] [the] language [which] is used in free, aimless, social intercourse" (Malinowski, 1923: 476). However, this linguistic behaviour is not at all exclusively restricted to those tribes but is a common and recurrent practice in most Western cultures because it is "[...] a type of speech in which ties of unión are created by a mere exchange of words" (Malinowski, 1923:478). Among its most frequent manifestations, the author mentioned a plethora of formulaic expressions of greeting, questions about the interlocutors' health, well-being, family, etc., narrations about apparently irrelevant facts or comments about topics that may seem obvious or trivial, such as the weather (Malinowski, 1923: 476-479). Their raison d'étre is to avoid silence which can originate an unpleasant tensión that may, in turn, have negative consequences for social interaction, since taciturnity is regarded in some cultures as an On the Phatic Interpretation of Utterances 229 evident sign of hostility or bad mood. Malinowski's (1923) work involved a more precise characterisation of an área of communication that had not until then been clearly identified, and made progress in the analysis of me functions of language. Nevertheless, asLaver(1975:215)complains, "[...] the very act of identification has seemed to inhibit further inquiry ", which might have been due to the traditional excessive emphasis of Linguistics on the study of form at the expense of a deeper insight into the cornmunicative functions and realisations of phatic communion. In fact, Coupland, Coupland and Robinson (1992: 207) have shown that many of the linguists who have dealt with phatic communion or phatic utterances have only repeated Malinowski's (1923) ideas. This was the case of Lyons (1968: 417), Hudson (1980: 109) or Silva (1980), who mentioned that phatic communion creates or maintains a feeling of solidarity and social well-being among interlocutors. But Malinowski's (1923) legacy also consists of an ambiguous approach to phatic communion. Although this linguistic behaviour is considered essential for social interaction because of the ties of unión that it creates, it is a type of discourse whose most remarkable feature is its triviality, obviousness or lack of interest. As a consequence, in other later descriptions some authors (e.g. Abercrombie, 1956: 3, 1998: 672; Turner, 1973: 212; Leech, 1974: 62) have assigned a negative valué to it and stressed its defective nature as regards the transmission of referential information. It can be concluded that these approaches presuppose an alternative type of discourse in which there is an authentic exchange of information and where language is not simply used to establish or keep the interactive contact between individuáis (Coupland, Coupland and Robinson, 1992: 210). This has resulted in a distinction between an informative and a social type of discourse, which can be traced back to Malinowski's (1923) original distinction between language used as an instrument ofreflection or as a mode ofaction, and has been present in our linguistic tradition in other dichotomies between two functions of language, which have reinforced the idea that "[...] talk was either giving information ('communication'), or doing something social ('phatic communion')" (Tracy and Naughton, 2000: 71).2 Although this negative characterisation suggests that individuáis regard an utterance as phatic whenfhey are aware of the triviality or mereness of its content, other authors have attempted to explain how and why individuáis interpret utterances or fragments of discourse as being aimed at avoiding silence and establishing or keeping interactive contact. In the next section I will review some of their proposals about this issue. 3. The phatic interpretation of utterances The studies that account for the reasons why individuáis interpret some utterances as phatic can be classified in two groups. On the one hand, there are those that relate fheir phatic interpretation to their being constituents of discourse structures occurring in very specific conversational phases. On the other hand, are those studies that argüe that the phaticity of 230 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses an utterance is not one of its inherent properties, but depends on the interlocutor activating particular mental structures and on the way in which he processes it. I devote the following two subsections to each of these groups of studies. 3.1. The infiuence of conversational structure As has beenpointed out, phatic communion is manifested through a wide array of linguistic tokens, such as greetings, comments or remarks about trivial or obvious matters, and questions and answers, most of which are organised as discourse sequences typically occurring in the marginal phases of interaction. In many cases, these sequences consist of adjacencypairs (e.g. Schegloff, 1972; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Sacks, 1992) which, following Hoey (1991: 67), arefrozen pairs owing to their little variability and high predictability3. This favours interlocutors' interpretation of such utterances as phatic (Coupland, Coupland and Robinson, 1992; Coupland, Robinson and Coupland, 1994), particularly because many of them are notunderstood as first topics (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973: 300). On the contrary, they do not transmit authentic factual information because they "[...] [are] oriented toward the interactional, relational aspect of communication" (Pavlidou, 1994: 490). Conversational analysts (e.g. Schegloff, 1972; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, 1977; Sacks and Schegloff, 1979; Sacks, 1992) proposed an initial criterion of strict adjacency that can be applied to this type of pair and according to which, the first element of a pair must be followed by a second one. However, this criterion was later on replaced by another of conditional relévame, which establishes that the realisation of the first element creates in the speaker very specific expectations about the occurrence of possible second elements that the hearer must produce, some of which are preferred whereas others are dispreferred by the former (Pomerantz, 1978, 1984; Sacks and Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, 1977). In my opinión, the phatic interpretation of some utterances may be conditioned by the fact that an interlocutor perceives them as being constituents of highly predictable frozen pairs occurring in the opening or closing phases. Thus, if an individual responds to an utterance with another that is the preferred element of the pair that both constitute, he may be indicating understanding that his interlocutor' s intention was for him to interpret the first utterance as phatic. In this way, following Bilmes (1988:74), the second element confirms that the first one has been interpreted correctly, as in (1) below. Although an individual may intend the hearer to process an utterance as phatic, the hearer may not necessarily recognise this, so that, if the second element were the dispreferred one, he would be communicating that he has not understood it as phatic, as in (2): (1) A: How are you doing? B: Fine, thanks. (2) A: How are you doing? On the Phatic Interpretation of Utterances 231 B: Well, Tve got a terrible headache today and my legs... 3.2. The importance of cognitive structures and informationprocessing In addition to the importance of conversational structure, Kasper (1984), Bahns, Burmeister and Vogel (1986: 698), and Schneider (1987, 1988) have stressed that individuáis' phatic interpretation of an utterance relies heavily on the activation of mental frames and the way in which they process linguistic data. Within such cognitive structures, individuáis store information of different nature. Some are higher-order frames which contain general abstract information, such as social valúes and conventions about interaction or specific exchanges, whereas others are lower-order frames in which individuáis store more specific knowledge about, for instance, the grammatical rules of their language. When interpreting linguistic data, hearers may carry out bottom-up processing by establishing a connection between those data and their lower-order frames, or they may also process them top-down, if they actívate higher-order frames and search for data that match those frames. As Kasper (1984: 3) points out, both procedures interact with each other, but bottom-up processing appears more suitable when communicative situations are not conventionalised - which prevenís hearers from predicting what will go on in them - or when they cannot actívate specific frames, while top-down processing seems appropriate for communicative situations that are highly conventionalised, when hearers have very firm expectations about exchanges or when they have activated many higher-order frames. Concerning the interpretation of utterances in the opening phase of a conversation, Kasper (1984: 10) sustains that hearers may reach a phatic interpretation if they actívate very specific higher-order frames about that context and process them top-down. Such frames allow interlocutors to predict the occurrence of conversation movements to a certain extent and perform the desired discourse fimctions because they contain information about, for example, the necessity to greet other interlocutors, who must greet first, the need to exchange phatic tokens, their content, or about how interlocutors can genérate phatic sequences. But they will also need a bottom-up analysis in order to confirm whether the activated frame is valid to process subsequent movements as phatic or whether they have to shift to another frame. Bottom-up processing of the linguistic form of utterances is also called for in order to determine their degree of formality or to select another that is cohesive with a previous one, as in (3), which contrasts with (4) whose second element is not cohesive with the first4 (3) A: How are you doing? B: I'mfine, thanks. (4) A: How is it going? B: I'mfine, thanks. 232 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses In contrast to the initial phase of a conversation, bottom-up processing is preferable in the medial phase of an exchange because utterances are not so conventionalised and interlocutors may expect a wider variety of conversational topics (Kasper, 1984: 12). Accordingly, in a conversation such as (5), bottom-up processing of the first interlocutor's third turn [3a] leads the second interlocutor to actívate a frame of phatic conversation and interpret it correctly as phatic, as she shows with the phatic comment [4b]. This gives rise to a new phatic comment, [5a], which does not provide very precise information. Nonetheless, the second interlocutor shifts then to a frame of information exchange, as can be deduced from [5b], because she does not use bottom-up processing and does not take into account the formal properties of the previous utterance; the vagueness of the response would have been a clear sign that the other interlocutor is acting within a frame of phatic exchange: [la] Colin: Helio, Angela! [Ib] Angela: Helio, Colin! [2a] Colin: On your own, then. [2b] Angela: Oh, yes. [3a] Colin: (sighs) God, the rash hour! [3b] Angela: (laughs) [4a] Colin: (sighs) [4b] Angela: You've worked until now? [5a] Colin: Yes, I've been quite busy this afternoon, quite busy. [5b] Angela: Oh, what have you done? [6a] Colin: Oh, I went to a lecture at three o'clock and then... er... talking to a few people about it, afterwards, till about five. Taken me nearly an hour to get back. Tube's terribly full. Uh, you know what it's like. [6b] Angela: Well, of course. (Adapted from Kasper, 1984: 9) Similarly, Coupland, Coupland and Robinson (1992) and Coupland, Robinson and Coupland (1994) have shown that in geriatric surgeries the activation of specific frames biases the interpretation of a general question such as 'how are you?' either as a phatic token or as an inquiry about authentic personal information, whilst Coupland and Ylánne- McEwen (2000) have illustrated that a topic like the weather can also have a phatic or nonphatic interpretation in travel agencies. As can be observed, these proposals explain some of the mental factors that contribute to the phatic interpretation of utterances. However, they do not consider whether there are other cognitive factors that condition their phatic interpretation. This is an issue that has been tackled by some Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995) pragmaticians, so I turn to it in the next section. On the Phatic Interpretation of Utterances 233 4. Relevance Theory and phatic utterances Within pragmatics, Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986,1995) is currently one of the most fruitful models, as it has involved a true revolution in this field by offering solutions to many linguistic problems. In this section I will first summarise its theoretical postulates and then discuss the analysis of phatic utterances suggested by some of its practitioners. 4.1. Basic theoretical postulates Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995) is aimed at explaining why an individual selects one interpretation of anutterance out of many possible ones and believes it to be the interpretation that the speaker might have intended to communicate. It conceives communication as an ostensive-inferential activity in which the speaker modifies the hearer's cognitive environment - i.e. the set of facts that are manifest to him or, in other words, which he can represent mentally - with an utterance because she has an informative intention, which is the set of assumptions that she intends to make manifest to him (Sperber and Wilson, 1986,1995:58). Inaddition, communication isunderstood as anovertprocess in which the speaker also has a communicative intention, which is her intention to make manifest to the hearer that she has indeed that particular informative intention (Sperber and Wilson, 1986,1995: 61). For the hearer to recover the interpretation intended by the speaker, he will have to contextualise the utterance by relating the information he obtains from its linguistic decoding to a subset of the information he has already stored, which constitutes his context for interpretation (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 108). The result of this process is cognitive effects, that is, the strengthening or contradiction of oíd assumptions, or contextual implications, which are new assumptions that can only be derived from the joint interaction of the information conveyed by the utterance with the oíd information the hearer possesses. However, this requires some cognitive effort from the hearer, which depends on his effort in selecting a suitable context for interpreting the utterance and its psychological complexity, since its syntax or unusual lexical items may render it more difficult to understand (Wilson, 1993: 348). Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995) claim that the hearer will choose a particular interpretation of an utterance if its processing yields a satisfactory amount of cognitive effect that offsets the cognitive effort invested in obtaining them, i.e. if he fmds that particular interpretation relevant. Furthermore, the hearer must also have some expectations of relevance and think that he will indeed recover those effects; otherwise, he will not pay attention to that utterance. An utterance becomes irrelevant if the assumptions made manifest are not related to any assumption that the hearer entertains, if the hearer already possesses those assumptions and fheir strength is not altered by the processing of the utterance, or if fhey are incompatible with the assumptions of the hearer and are so weak that they cannot modify them (Sperber and Wilson, 1986,1995: 120-121). 234 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses According to Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995: 157, 270) and Wilson and Sperber (2002:251,256-257), individuáis are always interested in establishing the optimaldegree of relevance of the information that they receive, so utterances must communicate a presumption of their own optimal relevance: their production must be accompanied by a tacit guarantee that their processing will provide the hearer with cognitive effects that compénsate his processing effort and that they are the most relevant ostensive stimuli that the speaker can think of, depending on her abilities and preferences. From this presumption of optimal relevance, Sperber and Wilson (1995: 260) formúlate the Communicative Principie of Relevance: " Any act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance"5. This principie inspires the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, which leads the hearer to follow the interpretive path that requires the least cognitive effort possible when testing his interpretive hypotheses of an utterance and to stop when his expectations of relevance are satisfíed (Wilson, 1999:136; Wilson and Sperber, 2002:259). This procedure reflects that the fact that the hearer easily accesses one interpretation of an utterance makes him believe that that interpretation is the one that the speaker intended to communicate. Similarly, this procedure makes it quite reasonable that the hearer should stop at the first interpretation that satisfíes his expectations of relevance: fhere should not be more than one optimally relevant interpretation of an utterance, since that would cause him the additional unnecessary effort of deciding about one of them. 4.2. The extant Relevance-Theoretic approach to phatic utterances Within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986,1995), Nicolle and Clark (1998), Zegarac (1998) and Zegarac and Clark (1999a) have tried to explain why an individual recovers a phatic interpretation of utterances. Like other authors, they also think that the phaticity of utterances is not one of their inherent features but depends on the interpretation that interlocutors make of them. Thus, Zegarac (1998: 334-341) argües that some utterances with which interlocutors frequently initiate a conversation do not communicate any information that achieves an optimal level of relevance because processing them in the most easily accessible context does not yield cognitive effects or results in very few of them. By virtue of the Communicative Principie of Relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), it would be expected that the interaction of the assumptions constituting the speaker's informative intention with those present in the hearer's context results in enough cognitive effects to compénsate his cognitive effort. However, the assumptions made manifest by those utterances are already manifest in the cognitive environment of both interlocutors, so they do not achieve an optimal level of relevance because of the speaker' s informative intention but because of the fact that she has a communicative intention. Accordingly, Zegarac (1998: 335) shows that an utterance such as (6) will be interpreted as phatic if it is already manifest to the interlocutors that fhere is a postal strike that very day: On the Phatic Interpretation of Utterances 235 (6) There is a postal strike today. Since the speaker's intention is not to inform the hearer about this fact, as he is already acquainted with it, he will reach an implicated conclusión6 such as (7) about the speaker's desire to maintain interactive contact: (7) The speaker is willing to communicate with me. According to Zegarac and Clark (1999a: 329-334), the interpretation of an utterance is phatic if it implies a proposition referring to the speaker's desire to speak with the hearer. Therefore, phatic utterances are utterances that give rise to a phatic interpretation and phatic communication includes ostensive acts of communication that are interpreted as phatic. Finally, they also state that an individual may be quite likely to recover a phatic interpretation of an utterance if its linguistic form is easy to process (Zegarac and Clark, 1999a: 336). Thus, a hearer will regard (8) as phatic becauseof its form; if the speaker did not intend him to do so, she would have to resort to another formulation, such as (9) or (10), where the additional linguistic material increases the hearer's processing effort and allows the speaker to show her real interest in the hearer: (8) How are you? (9) How are you these days? (10) How are you now that you've had the operation? Although Zegarac (1998) and Zegarac and Clark's (1999a) account offers a criterion that enables us to recognise this type of utterance, it has been severely criticised by Ward and Horn (1999), who contend that it reduces a very complex linguistic phenomenon to the mere indication of willingness to establish or maintain interactive contact. As I have commented elsewhere (Padilla Cruz, 2004a: 329), their conception of phatic communication might have been influenced by the belief in the existence of a purely informative discourse that makes manifest new assumptions which the hearer can combine with oíd ones in order to derive cognitive effects. However, phatic utterances result in very few or no cognitive effects at all so they would not be truly informative utterances. Ward and Horn (1999:556-557) also find a series of methodological problems in their proposal, for they think that, by relying on the notions of mutual manifestness and cognitive environment, Zegarac (1998) and Zegarac and Clark (1999a) adopt an omniscient view of communication, in which either the environment determines what each individual can mentally represent or the interlocutors share a certain knowledge that indicates in which circumstances they are more likely to be able to entertain some assumptions. Nevertheless, Zegarac and Clark (1999b: 572-574) maintain that individuáis can manipúlate their interpretive context so as to make sure that a phatic interpretation of an utterance will be optimally relevant, even if another non-phatic one could also be so. This is only possible if their cognitive environment includes assumptions about different ways of interacting, the 242 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 6. Conclusión In this paper I have suggested an analysis of phatic utterances as echoic attributive metarepresentations with which the speaker expresses an attitude of endorsement or acceptance of metarepresented assumptions. In my opinión, this analysis has two immediate consequences. On the one hand, as has been observed above, the reviewed studies of phatic utterances show that the phaticity of an utterance may be determined by factors such as its occurrence in a particular conversational phase being part of an adjacency pair, the activation of specific frames, the performance of a certain processing or by the fact that the assumptions that it makes manifest are already manifest in the interlocutors' cognitive environment. In addition to these factors, I think another one can be added: a hearer can interpret an utterance as phatic if he realises that the speaker is metarepresenting assumptions whose manifestness she is attributing to him and, at the same time, conveying an attitude of endorsement or acceptance of those assumptions. On the other hand, as regards the creation of solidarity and ties of unión between interlocutors that has been attributed to phatic utterances, I believe that it is a direct consequence of the similarity or identity that arises between the assumptions manifest to each individual, which the speaker is able to metarepresent using a phatic utterance, and of the transmission of an attitude of endorsement or acceptance. The hearer can determine that similarity or identity through the pragmatic processes of enrichment of the logical form of the utterance or testing whether those assumptions have similar logical or contextual implications. Moreover, the transmission of that particular attitude towards the metarepresented assumptions contributes positively to the hearer realising that the speaker also entertains thoughts, opinions or assumptions which share a certain similarity or identity with those that are manifest to himself. However, due to the theoretical nature of this work, it must be admitted that it is necessary to empirically test the hypotheses formulated in it. Therefore, it should be verified whether speakers notice that the assumptions made manifest by a phatic utterance are already mutually manifest in their cognitive environment and are also likely to be manifest to their interlocutors, if they perform the cognitive operations described and if they are awareofthem. Furthermore, following Wilson's (2003) suggestions, itwouldalso be advisable to investígate whether psychically handicapped individuáis have any difficulty in processing phatic utterances or process them differently. Notes 1. Foradiscussionof other issuesrelatedto phatic utterances, see Padilla Cruz (2001,2002, 2004b, 2004c, 2004d). 2. See Coupland and Ylánne-McEwen (2000:179) for a similar comment, and Gómez Morón (1998) or Holmes (2000), among many others, for critiques againstthe inappropriateness of these distinctions. On the Phatic Interpretation of Utterances 243 3. As Schegloff (1972) explains, the fact that somepairs are practically invariable does not exelude the possibility of expansión or insertion of other linguistic elements because of the interlocutors' mood or social relationship (e.g. Sifianou, 1989; Sacks, 1992) and other sociocultural conventions operating (e.g. Silva, 1980; Jakubowska, 1999; Sherzer, 1999). 4. Kasper (1984: 11) also warns and illustrates that an excessive focus on utterances and bottom-up processing may lead to erroneous interpretations and misunderstandings. 5. Sperber and Wilson (1995: 260) also propose the more general Cognitive Principie of Relevance: "Human cognition is oriented towards the maximisation of optimal relevance". 6. 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