Fourthly, language is often deeply concerned with a variety of social relations. We can be rude or polite, and our decision to be one or the other often depends on the social relationship with the person to whom we are speaking (Shut up, Be quiet, Would you please be quiet?, Could you possibly keep your voice down a little please? etc.) Cf. Forms of address (“persiranje”?) In his attack on the study of sense relations. Palmer insists on the point that some parts of language are wholly social and carry no information. The best examples are, naturally, chunks of phatic communion (Good morning, How are you? and / or all the Englishman’s remarks about the weather) PHATIC COMMUNION
The fact that human beings tend to talk when they meet, often leads to a sense of discomfort, even hostility, when silence occurs in such a meeting. Because talk is often a first step in establishing a relationship it is characterised by a stock of conventional utterances which break such silences and help to establish the participants in a mutual situation in which awkwardness and tension gradually disappear. Social contact is, in turn, liable to generate speech between participants who have nothing to say. This kind of utterance was given the name phatic communion by Malinowski, the anthropologist who studied the speech and customs of the Trobriand Islanders. He described such talk as a means by which 'ties of unionare created by the mere exchange of words.' Typically, in New Zealand, such phatic communion centres on comments about the weather, on personal appearance, enquiries about health, or affirmations about everyday things. It serves in an atmosphere-setting capacity, the purpose of which is the affirmation of presence and co-existence.