‘Small talk is not cheap’: phatic computer-mediated communication in intercultural classes

ABSTRACT

The present study aims to analyse the phatic exchanges performed by a class of nine intercultural Master's students during a collaborative assignment which demanded online discussion using English as a lingua franca (ELF). Prior studies on the use of phatic communication in computer-mediated communication have concentrated on social networking sites or micro-blogging (mostly Facebook or Twitter). Educational online tools, like the present e-forum, have received much less attention. Initially, I intended to answer three research questions: (i) Is phatic talk used in a transactional task? If so, what function(s) does it perform?, (ii) Is phatic talk affected by being computer-mediated rather than face-to-face? If so, in what ways? and (iii) How may an intercultural setting affect computer-mediated phatic talk? Results are preliminary but show that, despite the transactional character of the task, the students paid close attention to phatic communication as an essential way to build rapport and foster their collaboration as a group.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural pragmatics
• English as a lingua franca
• computer-mediated communication
• phatic communication
• collaborative e-forum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is beyond the scope of this study to address the debate regarding the difference between phatic communion and phatic communication. Suffice it to say that, even if these terms are often used interchangeably, they reflect different concepts (see Laver, 1975; Senft, 2009; González Manzo, 2014 for a further discussion on this issue). Given this paper's pragmalinguistic approach, I will adopt the general term ‘phatic talk’ to refer to this phenomenon.

2. As is well known, Jakobson (1960) distinguished four other functions of language together with the phatic function, namely, metalinguistic (verifying the code), emotive (expressing the sender's state), conative (inciting the receiver's response), referential (relating to a specific context) and poetic (existing as a construct for its own sake).

3. See Coupland et al. (1992) for a comprehensive review of traditional approaches to phatic communication.

4. This study belongs to the research project EMO-Fundett (The Discursive/Emotive Function in different texts and work contexts).

5. All the examples are preceded by a tag indicating the Forum and the post number. Thus, F1P1 refers to Forum 1, Post 1. Any additional comments to the examples are included in square brackets immediately after the example itself. For the sake of space, only the relevant section will be quoted in the case of lengthy posts.

6. Ventola (1979, pp. 270–273) distinguishes between ‘indirect’ and ‘direct’ approaches. The first refer to the communicative situation whilst the second allude to the addressee. Edmondson and House (1981, pp. 58–59) talk about ‘remarks’ and ‘discloses’. Remarks help ‘establish or increase familiarity with his hearer’, given that their propositional content commonly relates to topics with which ‘both speaker and hearer are assumed to be equally familiar’. Discloses offer information the speaker ‘believes [the hearer] may be interested/amused, etc. to gain the acquaintance of, or further familiarity with, his person’.

7. For example, comments like ‘Great view from here!’ or ‘The traffic in Madrid is horrible’, respectively, said from a hill where a great view can be seen or in the middle of a traffic jam (adapted from Padilla, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [grant number FFI2013-47792-C2-1-P].

Notes on contributors

Carmen Maíz-Arévalo

Carmen Maíz-Arévalo obtained her PhD in English Linguistics in 2001, being an English teacher since 1995. Currently Dr. Maíz-Arévalo holds the position of full time lecturer at the Universidad Complutense, where she teaches Pragmatics, English and Intercultural Studies, among other things. Her research focuses mainly on pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics; more specifically, speech act theory and verbal (im)politeness. both face-to-face and computer-mediated.