Phatic communion as local practice: anti-politeness and positive politeness in the Mexican context

Abstract

Traditional approaches have examined the study of phatic communion in terms of social function (Malinowski, [1923] 1984), language function (Jakobson, [1960] 1999) and their occurrence in the initial stages of openings and closings (Laver, 1981). Such attempts to categorise phatic communion in pre-determined universalistic terms (Svennevig, 1999) ran the risk of distancing the concept from everyday understandings where speakers and listeners engage in dynamic language use to achieve specific communicative goals in specific contexts. Contemporary approaches have attempted to reposition phatic communion in interpersonal terms. Less work has been carried out on phatic talk in Latin America, with some notable exceptions (Placencia, 2004, 2005). In order to investigate this concept in the Mexican context, where it is still considered in conventional terms, we examine a corpus of 88 instances of phatic communion collected in Guadalajara, Mexico. We argue that in this corpus, phatic communion is used to express positive politeness (Curcó, 1998, 2007) since it reinforces solidarity and supportiveness but that this is often done in unconventional ways given that the term has a wide scope since it embraces antipoliteness (‘anticortesía’), creative language use, language play, irony and anglicisms.