Phatic communication and Relevance Theory: a reply to Ward & Horn

Abstract

In Žegarac & Clark (1999) we try to show how phatic communication can be explained within the framework of Relevance Theory. We suggest that phatic communication should be characterized as a particular type of interpretation, which we call ‘phatic interpretation’. On our account, an interpretation is phatic to the extent that its main relevance lies with implicated conclusions which do not depend on the explicit content of the utterance, but rather on the communicative intention (where ‘depends on X’ means: ‘results from an inferential process which takes X as a premise’).