Strategies and Tactics of French Small Talk Discourse

Small talk is a genre of phatic communication. As an enunciative type of discourse, small talk is inherent in oral speech produced during direct communication. Its main function is to establish and guide interpersonal relationships. In institutional communication, formalized small talk regulates the status and roles of the interlocutors. This article describes the strategies and tactics of small talk in everyday informal communication in the French linguistic culture. The material was obtained from J.-M. Gouriot’s collection of bar chat (Les Brèves de Comptoir, 2014). The list of strategies identified included cooperation, avoidance, and clarification. They were realized through the tactics of generalization, explanation, refusal to communicate, changing the topic, trivialization, and repeated question. The strategies and tactics covered a wide range of lexical, stylistic, and syntactic devices. The common semantic structure could be described as dialogue des sourds, i.e., "the dialogue of the deaf". This effect is a promising research topic: the interlocutors lack a common communicative goal, and their individual strategies depend on their own worldview, life experience, and emotional state. In this research, the small talk discourse proved to reflect the general trends in modern communication. Simplified and depersonalized, such dialogues leave out the personality of the interlocutor and communication per se, focusing on the mere exchange of information. 

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