0 Phatic language has a social purpose, rather than being intended to give information: --
the phatic meaning of "How are you?"
phatic communication/utterances
Thus, diminutives are most likely to occur in phatic communication and vocative speech acts (subject to further pragmatic constraints).
Note that this observation is independent of, and therefore evidentially stronger than, our conceptual analysis of phatic communication.
We can easily imagine a context where the latter requires minimal processing (certainly less than the former), yet the former is clearly the more phatic.
They might have a case if phatic communication were not an already established and widely accepted technical term.
So far, our discussion has relied on the view that phatic implications are communicated ostensively.
Moreover, utterances which are conventionally phatic may have non-phatic interpretations in some contexts.
In section 4 we consider cases where cognitive effects similar to those caused by phatic interpretations are conveyed but not ostensively communicated.
Our account presupposed that these contextual assumptions made phatic interpretations more relevant (and non-phatic assumptions less relevant) than they would otherwise have been.
