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Phatic Competence: How LX Users Understand and Engage in Phatic Communion

This presentation investigates how LX (non-dominant) speakers of Canadian English navigate phatic communion, a form of interactional talk prioritizing relational goals. Drawing on pragmatism and interactional sociolinguistics, the research employs a mixed-methods design incorporating questionnaire data, naturalistic conversation, meta-talk, and retrospective commentary. Taken together, the findings suggest that LX phatic competence is demonstrated in myriad ways, as speakers each draw from their own rich (para)linguistic repertoire to explicitly signal phatic intention while intently monitoring their interlocutor’s contextualization cues to co-create meaning in the interactional moment. They also suggest that phatic success is not measured against (real or fictive) L1 benchmarks or assumptions of shared norms, but through deliberate orientations to participation, engagement, and emotional aftermath. This research study therefore contributes to an LX-centric understanding of multilingual phatic communion in practice, which has pedagogical implications for language classrooms as well as conceptual and methodological considerations for further research on LX relational discourse.