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Small Talk: Social FunctionsJustine CouplandPublished online: 14 Jun 2010.

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Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36(1), 16Copyright 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Small Talk: Social Functions

Justine CouplandCentre for Language and Communication Research

Cardiff University

Small talk has conventionally been taken, from both lay and academicperspectives, as a formulaic and superficial mode of talk. More recentwork, for example in J. Coupland (2000), has helped to bring into the fore-ground of research on social interaction a debate about the more positive,more prosocial functioning of small talk. This collection of articles con-tinues the work of exploring the wide range of social settings, genres, andtopics in which talk might, in various senses, be regarded as small and tofurther explain the implied contract between small and (supposedly)full forms of talk, along with the sociopolitics such assumptions carrywith them. But beyond this, the articles here take inquiry into small talkforward and mainly in one directionto a richer and more diverse appre-ciation of the social functioning of small talk.

Some general arguments have been made in previous work (Brown &Levinson, 1987; J. Coupland, Coupland, & Robinson, 1992; J. Coupland,Robinson, & Coupland, 1994; Eggins & Slade 1997; Laver, 1975; Schneider,1988; Tannen, 1989) that small talk enacts social cohesiveness, reducesinherent threat values of social contact, and helps to structure social interac-tion. Some of the more formulaic aspects of small talk, as often used in

Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Justine Coupland, Centre for Languageand Communication Research, Cardiff University, P.O. Box 94, Cardiff CF10 3XB, Wales, UK.E-mail: couplandj@cardiff.ac.uk.

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service encounters, enable servers and customers to define a mutual non-threatening relationship for the duration of the exchange (Beinstein, 1975,p. 94; see also Coulmas, 1981). In this vein, Scollon (1985) referred to a ma-chine metaphor for human communication that suggests that the machinemust be humming if we are not to believe it has broken down. If we sharea space with others, there may be a need to engage in small talk (McCarthy,2000) but we also need to construct copresence by making contact throughsmall talk across distances, for example, by telephoning friends or relativesjust to keep in touch (Drew & Chilton, 2000). As humans, we have sig-nificant emotional investment in what others think of us, through the im-pressions others gain of us in our contacts with them (Goffman, 1972,p. 319). The importance of small talk to social life seems incontestable.This issue aims to contribute to the understanding of how talk, when framedas small talk, facilitates more specific social functions. If the term smalltalk has not come into prominence, it is because it is the overshadowed an-tithesis of real, full, serious, useful, or powerful talk. Real talk istalk that gets stuff done, where stuff does not include relational stuff.Within this ideology, sociality is marginalized as a small concern, andlanguage for transacting business and other commercial or institutionalinstrumentalities is foregrounded.

Of course, it is widely acknowledged that all talk carries social and af-fective meaning, along with its representational or task-focused aspects.We might refer to Hallidays description (e.g., Halliday, 1978) of languageas simultaneously realizing three functions, or aspects, of meaning: theideational (the expression of content or the experiential aspect of mean-ing), the interpersonal (how the message expresses the social relationshipsbetween the relevant interlocutors), and the textual (which realizes mean-ings via the structure and organization of the message itself). So, for ex-ample, in making a comment on the weather to an acquaintance at the trainstation (e.g., lovely day today or what rain!) it is not that there is noideational significance in the message, but for the purpose of the exchangein that context and at that moment, the interpersonal focus is fore-grounded: Sociable contact holds sway (via the somewhat formulaic tex-tual design of such messages) over the ostensible interest in the weather.Naturally, all talk must be about something, or have an ideational func-tion, and all big talk must carry interpersonal messages. Let us considerLevinsons (1992) paradigm examples of activity types (p. 69)teaching,a job interview, a jural interrogation, a football game, a task in a workshop,and a dinner partyto illustrate this point further. What we are designating

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small talk is more or less likely to occur in a sustained way during thesekinds of speech events. Speakers communicative competence (Hymes,1972) will lead them to have strong intuitions about what kinds of con-straints there are within such activities (Kuiper & Flindall, 2000,pp. 184185), perhaps with the jural interrogation at one extreme of a clineof likelihood and the dinner party at the other. This is not to say that theconversationalists at the dinner party cannot or will not focus on task-related issues (elsewhere, Levinson mentioned business transactions con-ducted at a cocktail party as being an example of one kind of activityembedded in another; Kuiper & Flindall, 2000, p. 99), but as Levinson(1992) put it, there are strong expectations about the functions that anyutterance in a certain part of the proceedings can be fulfilling (p. 79). Theexpectations, or the social norms, surrounding a dinner party, for example,include that the interactants will come together to foreground therelational rather than ideational talk-work, or as Levinson (1992) put it,talk that is more closely related to types of social relationship than toactivities (p. 92).

Indeed, Thornborrows analysis of childrens peer-group talk in the earlyyears school setting considers the relationship between institutional, on-task modes of talk and relational, off-task talk. Although this interface hasbeen explored before (e.g., N. Coupland, & Ylnne-McEwen, 2000; Holmes,2000; Tracy & Naughton, 2000) it is a new concern in the study of childrenstalk, with the small/full dichotomy of their sociolinguistic lives underex-plored until now. But Thornborrow shows the role small talk plays for thechildren, for example, in that they are able to reestablish the status affordedthem by their social roles in the institutional hierarchy of the school by nego-tiating when to do small talk and when to resist it in favor of the business athand in interestingly asymmetrical ways. She finds the children using theiroff-task talk to negotiate serious moral issues. The establishment of groupnorms for beliefs and behaviors has until now only been seen as relevant togossip as a talk activity (Blum-Kulka, 2000; Eggins & Slade, 1997) but itseems that such important moral work may well have a wider provenanceas a social function of small talk.

As conversationalists, we tend to take our abilities to do small talkfor granted, and it is not the usual perspective to see small talk as anaccomplishment or skill, although Tracy and Naughton (2000) suggestedthat small talk is treated as a necessary element of institutional success atany level. Of course, whether at work or in the private domain, someconversationalists are perceptibly better, whether because they are more

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practiced or more socially motivated at putting others at their ease or atfilling potentially embarrassing conversational lacunae with enablingquestions or interesting comments about safe topics, for example. ButHolmes, in this issue, demonstrates the interactional consequences of amarked failure to engage in small talk in its function of doing collegial-ity. Holmes uses the social environment of the workplace to show thatwhere participation in small talk routines is not fully shared by novi-tiates (here, workers with intellectual disabilities), there are problematicconsequences. Holmess article reminds us of how central relational com-munication is, even in the transactionally oriented working environment.However, managing an impression of competence at the task talk level isnot enough; our success (however we judge it to be measured) at work isin no small part due to our ability to make small talk, which has a large partto play in the maintenance of a cohesive working environment.

Even though, within sociolinguistics, there is a strong tradition ofcommitment to the notion that individuals are concerned with creating con-versational involvement (see, e.g., Gumperz, 1982; Tannen, 1989), researchon social interaction has tended to have speakers and speakership as its pri-mary focus. However, in small talk, relational issues are paramount, and inthis issue, McCarthy looks at how listeners signal their involvement insocial chat, by using an extensive corpus of informal speech to retrieveproductive patterns of response tokens. At one level, the article fills outthe conventional account of how back-channel responses enact and symbol-ize conversational involvement and support. Again, however, the main inter-pretive line taken in the article relates to reading the interpersonal functionsof the nonminimal support tokens he finds. Of course, back-channel tokensare used in most conversational activities where exchange is the norm (ex-cepting, then, ritualized and rule-governed performances) so even in genresof social interaction characterized by densely task-related talk such as profes-sional consultations and interviews there is scope for marking engagementin feedback signaling. McCarthy argues that such tokens represent morethan simply what listeners do (or have to do if they are to be heard to besimply listening); they are microlevel resources for overlaying creativityonto formulaic speech (see also Kuiper, 2000) to provide more positive, andmore discriminating, social orientations and perhaps above all to signal var-ious forms of engagement (which we might take, at a macrolevel, as the pri-mary social function of small talk in all its manifestations).

Listenership is a facet of small talk taken up by Coupland and Jaworskiin our article on storytelling in small talk, which considers the specific case

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of taboo-breaking stories shared by young friends. The prototypical instanceof small talk, phatic communion, relies on safe topics and positive valencefor its status as comfortable ritual. But in their recreational talk, these speak-ers use various framing resources to establish transgressive talk as play-fully open and permissive. Small talk about bad or rude topics can thusbe rendered safe, and the friends thus display shared alignments to trans-gression and establish and confirm group norms. Through a sometimescomplex renegotiation of footing, real events can be projected in unrealnarrative frames, and story recipients at times accelerate the transgressivetalk, which is thus rehabilitated as a creator of intimacy. Especially in listen-ing to the tapes of the data, it is clear that the narrative elements are used asa vehicle for the pure enjoyment of communion.

Thus, the articles in this issue explore how small talk is achieved in-teractionally, turn by turn, and what this displays about small talk and itsachievements for participants in situ. However, what is conversationallyachieved by and for participants through small talk is likely to be differentdepending on the specific contextual constitution of the speech event, andthis is as true for cultural context as it is for context in its more local sense.Although it is important to recognize what Schegloff (1992) called thecontexting power of talk, the value and social significance of small talkis nonetheless highly contexted. Speakers orientations, framings, andfootings shift, reflecting their changing local priorities as talk proceeds, asthe following articles show. Each of the articles, in its own way, examineshow, as part of the process of fulfilling their intrinsically human needs forsocial cohesiveness and mutual recognition, people actively re-create thebonding and respecting behaviors, in local conversational routines, that arethe social fabric of their communities.

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Blum-Kulka, S. (2000). Gossipy events at family dinners: Negotiating sociability, presenceand the moral order. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small talk (pp. 213240). London: Longman.

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cam-bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Coulmas, F. (1981). Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communicationsituations and prepatterned speech. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton.

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Coupland, J., Coupland, N., & Robinson, J. (1992). How are you?: Negotiating phaticcommunion. Language and Society, 21, 207230.

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Coupland, N., & Ylnne-McEwen, V. (2000). Talk about the weather: Small talk, leisuretalk and the travel industry. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small talk (pp. 163182). London:Longman.

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