Phatic Senft

Senft, Gunter 2009. Phatic Communion. In: Senft, Gunter; Jan Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.), Culture and Language Use: Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 226-233.

Malinowski developed his ethnographic theory of language mainly in connection with his attempt to translate the Trobriand Islanders' magical formulae. He characterized his - pragmatic - theory of meaning as a theory that insists on the "linking up of ethnographic descriptions with linguistic analysis which provides language with its cultural context and culture with its linguistic reinterpretation. Within this latter Malinowski has "[...] continually striven to link up grammar with the context of situation and with the context of culture" (Malinowski 1935: 73). For Malinowski speech is part of the context of situation in which it is produced, language - in its primitive function - has an essentially pragmatic character, and "meaning resides in the pragmatic function of an utterance" (Bauman 1992: 147). (Senft 2009: 226)

That may be so in the case of his general approach to language, but his attitude towards communication, i.e. in his definition of phatic communion, he is being polemical for the sake of being polemical, employing the theory of meaning to give went to the prejudices of his social class. His own linguistic and ethnographic findings speak for themselves, and against his high-minded, even "flatulent" theoretical musings, which are scrawled up as an afterthought on the subject of group mind; the savages will never achieve mental communion and social unity because they're not intelligent enough, their use of language has "an essentially pragmatic character". The same goes for talking birds, infants, aphasics, and vocalizing primates, in some especially "advanced" cases, children, women, and old people - when one only considers the types of subjects accused of phatic communication it becomes quite clear why it is in fact a slur on those deemed dysfunctional or incommunicable.

In his contribution to Ogden & Richards book Malinowski also refers to the conception of 'context of situation' which is so important for his theory of language. In the central section of this article he emphasizes that language - at least in its primitive function - has to be regarded as a mode of action rather than as a countersign of thought; and that to understand the use of a complex speech situation requires the understanding of the situation in which it occurred and the action it accomplished. Malinowski then introduces the concept of 'phatic communion' into linguistics. Discussing language used in what he calls "free, aimless social intercourse", mentioning "inquiries about health, comments of weather" (Malinowski 1936: 313) [...] (Senft 2009: 226)

The saddening thing is that the "context of situation" is not all that important for phatic communion, for it seemed to himself "deprived of any" connection with "whan dappens at the moment" the content of the talk could not "be connected with the speaker's or hearer's behaviour, with the purpose of what they were doing" (PC 1.4), or, in other words, "the outer situation does not enter directly into the technique of speaking" (PC 7.3). He even pleads rhetorically that the "situation when a number of people aimlessly gossip together" consists mainly in the "atmosphere of sociability" and "personal communion" (PC 7.4-5). From what I gather, Malinowski's understanding of convivial gregariousness relies on the thymic opposition between "an atmosphere of calm" (Trotter 1921: 111), "the relaxing atmosphere of peace" (Trotter 1921: 125), as opposed to a "military atmosphere, in which a word of command is the supreme fact" (Trotter 1921: 126-127), "the customary frigid atmosphere" of WWI (Trotter 1921: 140-142), and "the heated atmosphere of national feeling" (Trotter 1921: 156) or "an atmosphere of fierce competition, of ruthless scandalmongering" (Trotter 1921: 182-183). John Dewey (1910: 178-179) notes that Locke distinguished "civil" and "philosophical" use of language, but I tend to think that Franklin Giddings' (1896: 4) invocation of Bentham's distinction between "a state of natural society" and "a state of political society" is more relevant. My thesis is that phatic communion cannot be fully understood without its own contemporaneous context and the origin of the ideas it unifies under a single signifier. Otherwise we'll be forever begging such questions as "free from what?" and "aimless how?" - and, by and bye, substitute an improbable theory with one more probable, and - one may only hope - specify one philosophical error in place of many.

Thus, Malinowski's concept of 'phatic (from Greek phatos, 'spoken') communion highlights - what ethologists would call - the 'bonding function' of language (Senft 1987: 111-112). Konrad Ehlich (1993: 317) quite plausibly interprets Malinowski's use of the word communion' with its religious connotation as a means for emphasizing the intensity of this type of speech. Malinowski's concept was borrowed and slightly modified by Roman Jakobson (196) in his expansion of Karl Bühler's (1934) 'organon model of language' to refer "to that function of language which is channel-oriented in that it contributes to the establishment and maintenance of communicative contact" (Lyons 1977: 53-54). I assume it is most probably because of Jakobsons rather influential paper that nowadays most linguists and anthropologists refer with the technical term 'phatic communication to Malinowski's concept. However, the term 'phatic communication' that many writers have used to refer to Malinowski's concept is not really an alternative to the term 'phatic communion. As Adam Kendon (personal communication) points out, the term 'phatic communication is probably used because people tend to forget the more general meaning of the term communion'; it is precisely that achievement of 'rapport' through the use of speech - a kind of communion, indeed - that Malinowski emphasized, and this is different from what is often thought to be the meaning of 'communication. Before I discuss the concept in more detail, I want to note that 'phatic communion' should not be confused with Austin's 'phatic act' which is defined as "the act of uttering certain vocables or words, i.e., noises of certain types belonging to and as belonging to a certain vocabulory, [|] in a certain construction, i.e., conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar, with a certain intention, &c." (Austin 1975: 92). (Senft 2009: 227-228)

"Bonding" was current in anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. Émile Durkheim and Havelock Ellis are prime suspects in that regard. Ehlich's interpretation is in German. My opinion is that the opposite is the case: "emphatic" is a red herring; the explanation more likely lies between the connection of disinteredness and sympathy; the illustrations, too, prove the opposite - free, aimless, social intercourse is the opposite of intense, it is lax, leisurely, an idle activity. It is a grand underestimation to say that Jakobson (1960d) only "slightly modified" the meaning. He more like emptied and refilled it to serve as the question of medium and meta-communication or communication about relationship; same with La Barre, who refilled it with less prejudiced anthropological and linguistic ideas, as with Austin, who refilled it in the same spirit, only with even less to give way to further development. Personally, I would make the case that these represent merely different "phatics" (plural), or phatic tropes, as Zuckermann (in press) distinguishes communion phaticity and contact phaticity - I think that there is an unimaginably lengthy and differentiated genealogy that can be uncovered for this term. It's a veritable venture in the history of terminology. That is to say that people not only "forget" the more general meaning of the term but that they had no way of understanding it fully in the first place. By no stretch of the imagination is there a certain demonic inspiration attached to the birth of phatic communion, but it is one of plagiarism, polemics, and prejudices. To me it is an unfolding drama of scientific correspondence, testified by a century popular use, and only approaching its dawn of comprehension upon further generations of book-learned thought in the world. Now that is pathos.

To briefly summarize again, based on Malinowski's definition and influenced by Jakobsons concept of the 'phatic function of verbal communication, the terms 'phatic communion (and 'phatic communication') are generally used to refer to utterances that are said to have exclusively social, bonding functions like establishing and maintaining a friendly and harmonious atmosphere in interpersonal relations, especially during the opening and closing stages of social - verbal - encounters. These utterances are understood as a means for keeping the communication channel open. It is generally claimed that phatic communion is characterized by not conveying meaning, by not importing information; thus, phatic utterances are described as producers without prepositional contents. Greeting formulae, comments on the weather, passing enquiries about someone's health, and other small talk topics have been characterized as prototypical examples for phatic communion ever since Malinowski's coining of the term. However, a search on the literature reveals that research dealing explicitly with 'phatic communion is a relatively neglected area in linguistics. Why is this so? (Senft 2009: 228)

"Conversations of greeting are naturally particularly rich in the exchange of purely ceremonial remarks, ostensibly based on some subject like the weather, in which there must necessarily be an absolute community of knowledge [and] It is possible [...] for a long conversation to be made up entirely of similar elements, and to contain no trace of any conveyance of new ideas" (Trotter 1921: 119). - I was, for a long time, mystified by Jakobson's addition of "prolongation", and thought of it as an artifact from the influence of Mowrer. It turned out that this aspect predated even Malinowski.

First of all it has to be mentioned that with the exception of 'Firthian linguistics' (Mitchell 1957, 1975; J. R. Firth 1957) and M.A.K. Halliday's work, Malinowski's functionalist pragmatic ideas about language had little influence in Europe. With respect to the USA, Noam Chomsky's student Terence Langendoen presented in 1968 a criticism of Malinowski's linguistic theory, arguing amongst other things that in 'The problem of meaning in primitive languages' Malinwki "failed to prove that the meaning of utterances is in any way related to contexts of situation" (Langendoen 1968: 25). Nevertheless, in the USA, Malinowski's ideas about speech as action certainly had much influence on the ethnography of speaking paradigm as well as on discourse and conversation analysis. (Senft 2009: 228)

So it is. Let's take a brief look at D. Terence Langendoen's The London School of Linguistics:

A mere phrase of politeness [...] fulfils a function in which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. (p. 315)

Thus all that Malinowski asserted concerning the nature of "phatic communion" was simply that it is a context, more or less well defined, in which people are not particularly concerned with what they say or with what they mean by what they say, and that they speak simply to avoid having to remain silent. From this it follows, however, that in general it is impossible to predict what people will say or whether they will say anything from a knowledge of the context of situation. [|] Curiously enough, it has been remarked that in situations in which men speak simply to avoid the embarrassment of having to remain silent, they resemble automata more than at any other time (Gardiner 1951: 43-44). We can remark only that if it is impossible to predict what men will say at the times when they most resemble automata - no matter what we know about the context of situation (including knowledge of the participants' complete past history and present physiological state) - how much more absurd it is to expect that we should be make such predictions when men are acting in their fullest human capacity. (Langendoen 1968: 24-25)

This is on point. Our opinions are shared. Even on Jakobson's esoteric hexagonal scheme places "context" where idea is, and "contact" down below, mediating between sender and receiver. Langendoen has also happily discovered The Theory of Speech and Language.

We have already noted that Malinowski seems to have been convinced that it is speech itself, rather than intentions behind speech acts, that determines social situations. However, considerations of actual social situations should quickly convince us that such is not the case. We may take as a simple example a social situation that Malinowski himself described in one of his ethnographic descriptions of Trobriand culture (1926: 78): a young man, an offended lover, publicly insults another party for an alleged crime with the purpose of setting public opinion so strongly against that party' that he has no recourse but to commit suicide. Certainly, in this case what determined the social situation was not the actual insult that the young man had hurled but his intentions in so doing. We can be quite certain that the one who made the public insult meditated beforehand on what he should say so as to make sure that a skeptical audience would be convinced of his case. The hearers certainly did not reach the conclusion, "the insulted party must commit suicide," simply upon hearing the speech. They arrived at the conclusion upon weighing the merit of the case as they perceived it, together with a determination of what the appropriate settlement of the matter should be. (Langendoen 1968: 25)

Yet another key. The conflation of action and intention might be one of those puzzling philosophical questions which so vexed these authors, as was the case with the type/token, speech/language affair. See Nietzsche, Mach, and Avenarius. This illustration puts "gossip" in relief. For thence is where sympathia malevolens is hidden. In my opinion, the relevant context of situation for illustrating phatic communion is found in the beginning of the Argonauts, "Soon after [...] I began to take part, in a way, in the village life, to look forward to the important or festive events, to take personal interest in the gossip and the developments of the small village occurrences" (Malinowski 1922: 7). As a third point, coincidentally concerning Thirdness, the illustration of a "hearing" evaluating the case rationally, this is a clear contradiction to the quality of unreflexiveness; a court case, to put it in another garb, is a paradigmatic situation, whereas most examples of phatic communion make them more-or-less enigmatic ones, where a certain dysfunction is involved.

Consider also the speech act that Malinowski quoted in section II of "The Problem of Meaning" in which a Trobriander boasted of his superior sailing prowess. The speech, Malinowski remarked, was intended to incite envy or admiration in his hearers, according to their [|] relationship to him (1922: 301). What motivated the native to speak in this way was the desire not simply to obtain the outward signs of awe and admiration from his hearers but to gain evidence that those persons thought him to be awe-inspiring and powerful. The important determinants of social situations in which speech acts are prominent are, therefore, not the speech acts themselves but the participants' thoughts, both those of the speakers and those of the hearers. (Langendoen 1968: 25-26)

And another one. See "the fame hypothesis". Much of it is cryptically about ambition, vanity, and power. As to, once again, the conflation of action and its fuid meaningful substratum, this passage vindicates both Nietzsche and his equally cryptic ramblings about sign-chains and Žegarac & Clark (1999) with their phatic implications and mutual manifestedness, which in a way recreates Trotter's "absolute community of knowledge". But, enough, Langendoen has proved interesting enough.

But it is exactly with one of the leading figures of the ethnography of speaking' approach that we find a rather severe objection against one aspect of Malinowski's concept of 'phatic communion. With the definition of the concept, Malinowski also claimed that his outline of a semantic theory is "throwing some light on human language in general" (Malinowski 1936: 310). However, this only slightly hedged claim that concepts of his theory of language are universal, is explicitly refuted by Dell Hymes (1967, 1972, 1974). Hymes refers to the 'ethnographic record' that suggests that "phatic communication is far from universally an important or even accepted motive" (Hymes 1972: 40). (Senft 2009: 228)

Civilized and savage alike, eh? Claims of both universality and ponderings about national characteristics were apt to suggest but not verify themselves, seeing as they came from the pens of Victorian philologists. There is a lot to be said in defense of the acceptance of this motive, seeing as Dewey's version made it to a large portion of psychology, and the type espoused by Richards is still popular today, even if the golden boy happens to be Jakobson. The illustrations given (i.e. David Crystal arguing that "The weather is not as universal a conversation-filler as the English might think!") I will not bother with - it is fighting with windmills. Unaware of the aspect of malevolence and unknowledgeable of the art of conversation, many are drawn to argue with reactionary type of thinking. Talking about the weather was recognized as a vice, as opposed to a virtue, half a century before the Pole and possibly as far back as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. There is no point arguing with the weather, the weather is sovereign and autonomous, it speaks only to listen, it is intrinsically coded.

However, this criticism is somewhat incoherent. One of the things one may do in leave-taking, even if one is English, is to refer to some sort of external reason that explains that one is no longer free to stay. Adam Kendon (Personal communication) pointed out that for example henpecked husbands in pubs have been known to talk along the same lines: "The old lady will have it in for me if I don't scapa". Hence the Rundi women are doing just what English people do - although what constitutes the unavoidable circumstance that compels a person to leave is a matter of cultural variation. Thus, we can summarize that the universality of the concept of 'phatic communion' as well as the universality of conversational topics that are claimed to be characteristic for phatic communion have been questioned by writers like Hymes and Crystal. We have to conclude that this issue is indeed a matter for further research. (Senft 2009: 229)

Same as I felt when reading Haberland's manual (1984) and historical note (1996). He focused his energies and criticism to the dissonance between communication and communion without explaining what the latter means. It is not enough to point out the difference. There is a specific reason why Malinowski talked of communion, and not communication, or, to be precise, of how (phatic) communion is the opposite of communication with its three hierarchically organized functions, that it is essentially the case of dysfunction. Likewise, here, the simpler route is taken, that of dysfunction in the sense of discontinuation, termination, taking leave. The more difficult thing to do is to examine the supposedly functional aspect of phatic communion. Instead of the end of civilization, as Nietzsche would have it, its social origins. Why should all the enlisted sentiments bring people together? What is the role of pugnacity and brute force in the origin story of human society these authors espouse?

A few more words about staying and going. The external reason is on to something. It is on to the utilitarian "ends" of speect qua action. What could help here would be to generalize further along the scale of social abstractions, in other words, level up to the group from the level of dyads; phatic communion does not recommend itself to thinking about dyads, it's social nature consists in the company of an audience of an undetermined size. Communion suggests public speaking and proselytizing on top of a soap-box, even of propaganda (which evidently tittillated the Allports during WWII). When one really comes down to it, the generalizaton about universal conversation topics is rightly criticized, but the point remains, "the mechanization of speech" favours "community of knowledge".

However, this discussion with respect to the universality of the concept only partly helps to explain why we find only a few studies that explicitly deal with 'phatic communion as defined by Malinowski. Is there something wrong with the concept, one is tempted to ask? To find an answer to this it may be helpful to go back to Malinowski's definition and see what topics he mentioned as typical examples for phatic communion. Besides "injuiries about health, comments on weather", and the "modern English expression, 'Nice day to-day'" he refers to "the Melanesian phase 'Whence comest thou?'" (Malinowski 1936: 313, 314). How do the Trobriand Islanders - with whom Malinowski worked and lived together and who inspired his linguistic theorizing - express this 'Melanesian phrase' in their language? And does this expression really function as an act of phatic communion (only)? (Senft 2009: 229)

That is what I am trying to figure out. My hypothesis is already given above, that it is lacking context for understanding it fully because the ideas it is based on are no longer current and, what's even worse, the technical language it is formulated in is obtuse and obfuscates more than it illuminates. Some parts of it are catchy, for sure, but some are just downright unquotable and ignored. Jakobson does not employ it as that heavy handed of a slur against his subjects, he was even poetic about it. I am also glad to see that the question of corpora gets addressed. I've found very meagre actual linguistic data pertaining to phatic communion in Malinowski's writings; it may be guessed that Barton's philological corpus was sufficient for Malinowski's postulations. Looking over some notes I found thinkers a century apart affirming that sovereignty and autonomy have a lot to do with the simultaneity of a process and a product. How much, one may wonder, is this parallelled by Jakobson in the notion of "fixation upon [...] their contact" (Jakobson 1971[1969c]: 661) and how fruitful its elaboration would turn the study of love letters or books about all things related to the intersection of phatic and poetic, these two competing metafunctions.

In Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders, we find the following greeting formulae that are similar to our European greetings, which can probably be traced back to the influence of European and Australian missionaries: bwena kaukwau (good morning), bwena lalai (good day), bwena kwaiyai (good afternoon), and bwena bogi (good night) (Senft: 1986). However, these formulae are only used in rather formal situations. The general greeting formulae on the Trobriand Islands consists of the question ambeya or its shortened form ambe which literally translates as 'where' and which can be glossed here either as 'where are you going to?' or, according to the situational context, as 'where are you coming from?' or, if you like, as 'whence comest thou?'. (Senft 2009: 229)

Õu, kus lähed? & Kartulit juba oled söönud? The overall point here concurs with Dorothy Lee's thinking in "Lineal and Nonlineal Codifications of Reality": "the unquestioned assumption of the line as axiomatic [and] The line is omnipresent and inescapable, and so we are incapable of questioning the reality of its presence" (Lee 1950: 92)

In a social encounter situation the participants ask each other this question and answer it as accurately and as truly as possible, usually in the form of complex serial verb constructions such as Bala bakakaya baka'ïta basisu bapaisewa ('I will go, I will take a bath, I will come back [to the village], I will stay [there], I will work'). This greeting formula certainly signals friendliness and opens the communication channel. But what is really happenng? ith this form of greeting Trobriand Islanders signal and assure persons addressed - and greeted - in this way that they can completely rely on their status as members of a community where everybody cares for the other. This implies a person's security within the community's social net, and this also guarantees a persons secure way to her or his destination, a secure stay, and a secure way back home to where he or she came from. Keeping these functions in mind (which, by the way, are not - etic - interpretations but represent my phrasing of explanations my Trobriand consultants gave me at a very early stage in my field research), the meaning of these greeting formulae becomes evident: if anything may happen to Trobriand Islanders on the way - be it by the influence of evil spirits or because of 'black magic', or because of a more 'profane' accident like breaking one's lef on the small, narrow, and stony paths or being hit by a falling coconut - they can be sure that their whereabouts are (roughly) known and that people will search for them and help them. Thus, the greeting formula cannot only be regarded as a 'ritual' of friendly encounter; as a binding ritual it also signals security within the social net of the community in which it is used. (Senft 2009: 230)

Neat, awareness and acknowledgement of people's comings and goings serve the protective function of the herd instinct. Argonauts is full of such descriptions, indeed, e.g. "Sailing has to be done, so to speak, on straight lines across the sea. Once they deviate from this course, all sorts of dangers crop up. Not only that, but they must sail between fixed points on the land. For, and this of course refers to the olden days, if they had to go ashore, anywhere but in the district of a friendly tribe, the perils which met them were almost as bad as those of reefs and sharks. If the sailors missed the friendly villages of the Amphletts and of Dobu, everywhere else they would meet with extermination." (Malinowski 1922: 222) - not to mention the psychological detail that can be given to "the stranger".

I understand this kind of greeting as a form of ritual communication' on the Trobriand Islands (Senft 1987: 107-108; 1991: 245-246; see also Senft in Eibl-Eibesfeldt & Senft 1987: 92-94, and Huxley Huxley 1966). Without going into more detail here, I want to emphasize that even on the Trobriand Islands "the Melanesian Phrase 'Whence comest thou?'" obviously conveys more than the social function of creating a bond between speaker and addressee, because the phrase initiates routine exchanges that are rich in information - and one wonders why this function escaped the great ethnographer's attention. (Senft 2009: 230)

I wonder. The referential function merely lapses, language retains its semantic history even when ritualized. Huxley, Julian 1966. A discussion of ritualization of behaviour in animals and man. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 772(271): 247-526. [JSTOR] - Doesn't the attack dog want to be its master?

The observation that there is generally more behind an utterance which is said to serve only a phatic function, also holds for all of the rather few studies that explicitly deal with the concept of 'phatic communion'. Thus, in his anthology Conversational routine we find a contribution by Florian Coulmas in which he emphasizes for Japanese that although "most apologies observed in everyday interaction" seem to be "desubstantialized routines with no semantic content, merely functioning as means of 'phatic communion'" the situation is more complex: "the functionally similar employment of apology and gratitude expressions must be seen as a significant reflection of social values and attitudes prevailing in Japanese culture" (Coulmas 1981: 87). (Senft 2009: 130)

I would call it "apophatic doubt", and it consists in the privation of certitude to Malinowski's negations of other functions. The functional hierarchy is not "harmonized", and even if it were in theory, as in Jakobson's scheme with its dominant and subordinated functions, it is still difficult to resolve in linguistic analysis; more often than not there is pleasure and pain taken in outlining the functions but not of employing them in turn and in conjunction, so as to elucidate the multiplexity of how a linguistic message functions in a concrete context of situation.

In the same volume, John Laver points out that the "linguistic behavior of conversational routines, including greetings and partings, as well as pleas, thanks, excuses, apologies and small talk, in part of the linguistic repertoire of politeness" [|] (Laver 1981: 290) as analyzed by Brown & Levinson (1978). Discussing utterances of phatic communion, he finds that besides the two social functions already mentioned by Malinowski (viz. to "defuse the potential hostility of silence" and to allow participants in a social verbal encounter "to cooperate in getting the interaction comfortably under way": Laver 1981: 301), these linguistic routines also have a third and probably more important function in the initial phase of conversation: "phatic communion [...} allows the participants to feel their way towards the working consensus of their interaction [...], partly revealing their perception and their relative social status" (Laver 1981: 301). (Senft 2009: 230-231)

I'm intentionally forestalling reading Laver's other publications. "Defusion" ~ propitiation. Cooperation, on the other hand, appears to be a carry-over from other parts of Malinowski's essay, finding "practical" social aspects in the procedure and phases of interaction. Feeling "their way towards the working consensus" certainly sounds like a loquacious circumvention (a circumloqution) of "establishing social union". It hinges on a psychological theory of working consensus, itself a far offshoot of the social contract, now a permanent and fluid challenge.

In an earlier, and most important paper for the discussion of Malinowski's concept, Laver (1975) elaborates on all "communicative functions of phatic communion" in detail. In this paper, he first points out that "the fundamental function of the [...] communicative behavior that accompanies and includes phatic communion is the detailed management of interpersonal relationships during the psychologically crucial margins of interactions" (p. 217). He then describes and analyzes the functions of so-called 'phatic communion utterances in the opening and closing phases of interaction, especially with respect to the transition phases from "noninteraction to full interaction" and from "interaction back to noninteraction" (p. 232), as well as the role of phatic communion with respect to interactional consensus and as a kind of 'rite of passage'. (Senft 2009: 231)

Laver has too much Firth in him. I'm sad to say that now even Laver's phrasing appears tautological; phatic communion functions because it isn't communicative. It's like asking, "What is full about this empty barrel?" The thing that really gets me is the fixation. Why should the management of interpersonal relationships be "detailed"? What purpose would overworking one's self-consciousness serve in something supposed to be taken easy? That way lies disinteredness, a pathos of distance.

Thus, Laver modifies and broadens Malinowski's concept, emphasizing and proving again that "language is used to convey more than the prepositional content of what is said" (Levinson 1983: 42). (Senft 2009: 231)

What is consecutiveness?

In general, it seems that within linguistics, anthropology, and anthropological linguistics some of Malinowski's basic ideas about language and culture continue to be thought-provoking. With explicit reference to Malinowski as "an ethnographic precursor" (Goodwin & Duranti 1992: 14), social scientists have for instance started 'rethinking context' (Duranti & Goodwin 1992). Thus, although some of his ideas about language - such as the concept of 'phatic communion - have to be modified and redefined, there still seems to be much in Malinowski's research from which we can learn and profit. (Senft 2009: 232)

That they are. But, then again, Malinowski's essay was always famous, and today one doesn't even have to read it to get infected with phaticism. The thing I'm really waiting and betting on, is that as copyrights lift on books from 1923 and, soon, the following years, we'll get a watershed of similar and better ideas that could carry us much further. The bibliography of this paper is excellent and full of unfamiliar material.