Beyond Words: The Significance of Phatic Communication in Instant Messaging

Despite its non-informative nature, phatic communication is not a residual, peripheral category without significance, as expressing denotation is not the sole goal for coding and decoding messages. People engaging in phatic talk are not just shallowly conversing out of boredom, but attempting to navigate an intricate web of social bonds, adapt, connect, and negotiate their relations. The importance of this side of verbal interaction cannot be understated, as it shines brightly in the light of the emerging digital age. The virtual environment incentivizes people to text, speak, message, and connect to others just to maintain ties and nurture relations, turning the non-informative small talk into a key modern skill one must possess to graciously navigate online social norms. This study examines phatic devices used in instant messaging on the popular WhatsApp platform. The corpus is selected to display various solidarity and status-differential relationships, in order to examine the difference in the phatic tokens used (neutral, self-oriented and other-oriented) and to explore the distinctions in communicative strategies. Special attention is paid to the role of emojis to express phatic intentions, through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus, revealing their rich pragmatic functions.