ASPECTS OF PHATIC COMMUNION IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Phatic communion is, accordingly to Malinowski, the exchange of words between participants with the hope of initiating and maintaining social contact. But it goes beyond mere words and connects seemingly disparate concepts of language structure, politeness and social forces. We attempt to understand the motivations of an individual's language behaviour during phatic communion by examining the linguistic environment which the individual is exposed to, the socio-cultural background of the individual, his stratificational position in society, and the social--psychological distance between himself and other participants. Apart from the phatic communion achieved through greetings in the initiating part of a communicative contact, and the farewells in the ending of the contact, the scope of phatic communion can be widened to include other means by which people engage in this practice. Laver (1974) says that the " .. fabric of conversation . . . should be thought as woven together" with different communicative strands such as "speech, eye contact, facial expressions .... " etc, to form a " .. multistranded communicative behaviour". Other phenomena present in phatic communion in Singapore, and perhaps elsewhere, include the occurrences of codeswitching and channel maintenance devices. These have been found in, many instances, in the phatic communion of people, achieving the equivalence in effect as the exchange of actual linguistic expressions would. Phatic communion conducted between disparate generations provide evidence for its function as an index used to distinguish peer-group interactions and cross-generation interactions. The rationale is that the linguistic tokens used reflect the speaker's view on the social structuring of the interaction by relating these expressions to some ingrained social formalities that might have triggered the language behaviour of participants.