0 Phatic language has a social purpose, rather than being intended to give information:
phatic communication/utterances
the phatic meaning of "How are you?"
The contextual functions of an indexical are inseparable from its expressive and phatic functions.
These exchanges illustrate the sorts of phenomena to which the term ' phatic ' might be applied.
Rather, it constitutes par t of a ritual, almost phatic, way of continuing with the sequence of interaction.
But, in this context neither the phatic nor the non-phatic interpretation is likely to be very salient.
The more phatic implications a communicative act has, the more phatic it is.
What distinguishes phatic implicatures is that they depend to a greater extent on the communicative intention than on the proposition expressed by the utterance.
The third intuition was that phatic interpretations become more likely when the social relationship between the interlocutors is in doubt.
Our account presupposed that these contextual assumptions made phatic interpretations more relevant (and non-phatic assumptions less relevant) than they would otherwise have been.
