Analysis of Phatic Utterances in Fictional Dialogue: A Case study of Austen’s Persuasion

Any conversational exchange can be informational or phatic. Occasional exchanges are of no lesser importance than the informative content of the dialogue. One needs to establish the channel of communication by setting up a social environment which is conducive to the exchange of ideas among the participants. The present qualitative corpus based study was conducted to investigate a sociolinguistic framework designed for the analysis of naturally occurring conversations. Laver’s theoretical framework of phatic communion was applied to analyze phatic utterances in Austen’s Persuasion. Based on the theory, the kinds of comments or tokens that speakers use in phatic exchanges are classified as neutral tokens, self-oriented and other-oriented tokens. The conversation samples of persuasive criteria were selected for phatic communion, and thereby explain the process of persuading someone to think differently. The findings revealed that phatic communion can be informational and meaningful to follow certain special aims, as this paper demonstrated the novel’s phatic communions followed the aim of persuasion.