This research investigates the nature of phatic communion in instant messaging

interactions. It adopts and expands Jakobson's much-quoted definition according to

which 'phatic' is the language in an interaction whose primary purpose is to
maintain contact between the speakers. Adapting conversation analysis for the study
of textual interactions, the research observes the linguistic means used by
interlocutors to signal attention, interest, and agreement - these being identified
as important constituents of contact. The corpus comprises 60 chats, collected from
20 participants who chat in a mixture of English and Indian languages such as
Marathi and Hindi. Openings, middles, and closings of these interactions are
analyzed to study the ways in which participants establish, maintain, and terminate
contact. The use of various linguistic means in these interactions such as back-
channels, evaluations, expressives, and questions draws attention to a significant
amount of interactional work done by interlocutors towards maintaining contact.
(Kulkarni 2014: 117)
This is one extremely interesting abstract (abstracts are not often this
interesting). I see that Kulkarni has made the connection between phatic function
and phatic communion, but probably is not critical towards the simplicity of
Jakobson's interpretation of phatic communion, as this seems focused on his
interpretation. On the other hand, one could probably replace attention, interest
and agreement with Ruesch's understanding, acknowledging and agreeing and reach new
frontiers. Dipti Kulkarni defended a 150-page doctoral thesis on this subject in
2012 and uploaded it to academia.edu - which means that I may read the complete
work, too.
The idea of phatic communion is traced to Malinowski (1923), who coined the phrase
to refer to the language used to build ties of union with other members of the
community. The linguistic function so conceived as some overlaps with the
'interpersonal' in Halliday's functional model (1973) and the 'social' in Lyons's
classification (1996). The concept is important because it counteracts the emphasis
on the descriptive function of language and draws attention to the social,
interpersonal use of language. (Kulkarni 2014: 117-118)
Firstly, it was the demon of terminological invention that coined the phrase
through Malinowski and I'm not so sure it originally referred to "phatic language".
Secondly, wow. I'm only dimly aware of Halliday and Lyons so I didn't know about
these parallels, but reached a similar conclusion through Ruesch - that the phatic
function should rather be the social function.
The predominance of internet-based media such as instant messaging and social
networking sites in facilitating our social interactions makes it pertinent to
study phatic communion in this environment. Amongst the various communication
platforms available on the internet, phatic communion will be observed here in
instant messaging (IM). IM is a computer-based programme offered by websites such
as Gmail, Yahoo and MSN that allows two people (in each other's contact list) to
interact in real time through the continuous exchange of text messages. (Kulkarni
2014: 118)