© 2000 by Oxford University Press
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
'You've worked with Elizabeth Taylor!': phatic functions and implicit
Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkhorn University, Pathumwan, Bangkok 10330 Thailand E-mail: wrboyle@hotmail.com
A pioneering study of compliments by Manes and Wolfson (1981) revealed that three syntactic patterns accounted for nearly two-thirds of the 686 compliments collected, and it led the researchers to conclude that compliments in middle-class American society are formulaic. That study has been replicated on many occasions in subsequent years, and the results have served to reinforce the basic findings of Manes and Wolfson (1981). Existing research, however, has focused almost exclusively on the collection of explicit compliments by means of the ethnographic method (Holmes 1988b: 507), and it appears to have adopted a restricted view of the phatic function of compliments. In contrast, this paper argues that a more balanced picture of complimenting is required and that the neglect of the study of implicit compliments should not continue. To this end, it uses an ethnomethodological approach to the understanding of data and it follows Laver (1975, 1981) and Coupland et al. (1992) in focusing on the exploratory function of phatic communion. It analyses data extracts in order to show how implicit compliments are constituted and how the exploratory function of phaticity can allow speakers to negotiate greater affiliation with others.