Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of, relating to, or being speech used to share feelings or to establish a mood of sociability rather than to communicate information or ideas.
Wiktionary
- adj. Pertaining to words used to convey any kind of social relationship e.g polite mood, rather than meaning; for example, "How are you?" is often not a literal question but is said only as a greeting. (Similarly, a response such as "Fine" is often not an accurate answer, but merely an acknowledgement of the greeting.)
Etymologies
- From Greek phatos, spoken, from phanai, to speak; see -phasia.
Examples
“Weed was the reason girls selected clothes based on fuzziness, the reason boys sounded dumb, the reason we inflected every sentence as a question and usedlike andyou know as phatic communications.”
“Recapitulating phylogeny as ontogeny, Jakobson states that the phatic is "the first verbal function acquired by infants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication" (356).”
“The phatic is then the point at which language opens human being to the natural world (which, for shamanic cultures, is simply a larger assemblage of "people").”
“This has some interesting ramifications, I think, for what Jakobson refers to as the phatic function, what other linguists have referred to as the relational or contact function, what I'm calling the connective function.”
“You might even sense that responses like "sure," "anytime," or "no problem" - as well as "you're welcome" itself - are what linguists call phatic communications, words that don't really convey information so much as they perform a social role.”
“Jakobson derived the term "phatic" (for communications that foreground the contact) from Malinowski's work on meaning in "primitive" languages.”
“I'm not acquainted with literary theory, and my academic training is in the rather different fields of hard science and history (where the words "polysemic" and "phatic" are not often used), so when I read books like this I am not really looking to participate in the intellectual debate that the author may want to have.”
“We might be better asking, then, whether the apparent redundancy of much phatic communion may in fact reflect another function, that of compensating for the acts of initiation and termination which are necessary parts of all conversations simply because all conversations are finite, limited by circumstance.”
“It could be argued, of course, that Petey's refusal of accord, continuing throughout the pages of the breakfast scene, essentially stalls the conversation at the opening stage of phatic communion, connective language, that Meg's attempts at initiation are failures.”
“The formulaic banality of these operations of phatic communion is such that information is actively absented.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘phatic’.
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set phasers to...
you name the setting
I've tuned mine to be gentler and kinder
following suit is not mandatory but would be appreciatedcoddle, confuse, flummox, tap, furrow, instigate, invigorate, punnify, logical, must... act... be..., bowdlerise, laughing gas and 419 more...
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Adjectival Arcana
A roster of adjectives that infrequently surface in typical conversation and writing. Many are dredged from scientific or other technical jargon or sieved from examples of disused archaic forms.
unitegmic, acaulescent, reticuloendothelial, ingressive, uniate, acanthopterygian, ossific, epiphysial, perivisceral, acœlomatous, cestoid, acælomate and 7762 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Lyngwistix
semantic, semiotic, linguistic, etc.
lexeme, sonorant, prosody, monophthong, portmanteau, dithyramb, inflection, deixis, mondegreen, screed, persiflage, polysemy and 27 more...
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Happy Words
An atmosphere of goodwill
cryptofascistbbq denoting speech used to express or create an atmosphere of shared feelings, goodwill, or sociability rather than to impart information: phatic communion. Jul 14, 2009
garyth123 i am so non-phatic:) Dec 22, 2008
johnmperry Or as Marshall McLuhan has it, "the medium is the message." Aug 25, 2008
roseandivy It is so unappealing, but it has such a great meaning. Pity. Mar 3, 2008
misterpolly I am a great fan of "phatic communion" - conversational exchanges with almost no meaning ("Nice weather for this time of the year!") just to show that you care enough to say something. Dec 17, 2007