Appendix
6.2 Telephone openings
6.2.3 Greek openings - German openings
6.2.3.1 Some basic features
Owing to space limitations, in this section I can only point out some very general fea- tures of Greek and German telephone calls.41 would like to start by giving two exam- ples of openings, one Greek and one German.
EXAMPLE 1: A Greek opening
{A (Sofia, femaie, 26 years old) and B (female, 28 years old)) are friends; A calls 8 to tell her about a lecture they wanted to go to, but after that they move on to another topic}
1. B Orate,
$Yes, please. $ 2. A Ja su LIA.
$Hello LIA.$
3. B Jasu SOFIA.
$Hello SOPHIA.$
4. A Tijinetel
$How are you doing?$
5. B Kata. Ti najini? tsiga, ESI ti kanis.
$Fine. Nothing special. Everything is quiet. How are YOU.$
6. A Ka:fa: c eyo.
$l am fine, too.$
7. B Mm.
$Hm.$
8. A 9imi:Qi:ka: telika timu e:le:je:s oil iOelesna su po:.[...]
$l finally reme:mbe:red what you to:ld me that you wanted me to terll you. [. . .]$
EXAMPLE 2: A German opening5
(A (male, 28 years old) and B (female, 27 years old) are friends; A calls B in order to thank her for sending him some English workbooks, but after that they move on to other topics}
{telephone rings}
1 . 8 B {name}
(Continued)
122 Culturally Speaking
EXAMPLE 2: A German opening—cont'd
2. A Tach, BhierisA.
$Helio B, this is A {name} speaking.$
3. B Ah, hallo A!
$Qh, hiA!$
4. A Ich wotlt mich nur fur die Hefte bedanken!
$1 just wanted to thank you for the pamphlets!$
As indicated in the examples above, both Greeks and Germans perceive the ringing of the telephone as a summons to which they respond by picking up the receiver and taking the first turn in the conversation. Greeks usually answer the phone with utter- ances like ne ('yes'), lejete (say-IMPERATIVE), embros ('go ahead'), malista ('yes'), or as in the example above with oriste ('yes, please', literally: order-IMPERATIVE). Although Germans may sometimes also take the first turn in a similar manner and answer with, for example, Ja bitte ('Yes please') or Hallo ('hello'), it is more typical in German tele- phone calls for the answerer to take the first turn, as in the example above, and identify himself/herself, usually by saying his/her last name. This is then followed by the caller's self-identification, either by last or first name or both, commonly in combination with an appropriate greeting formula depending on the relationship and the time of the day.
In Greek telephone calls, on the other hand, self-identification, especially on the answerer's part indicates a work-place setting and foregrounds the speaker's orienta- tion to an efficient completion of the call (as is common, for example, in business or institutional contexts); otherwise, Greeks when talking to friends or relatives seem to prefer covert-identification, in other words, via voice-samples, as in Example I.6 Greet- ings may be interchanged, too, as is the case in turns 2-3, of the Greek example: ja su ('hello', literally: health to you-T-form) or simply ja (literally: 'health') is the most common informal greeting formula, used also for terminating the call, especially the variant ja xara (literally: health joy).7
6.2.3.2 The use of phatic talk in Greek and German openings The term 'phatic' was first used in linguistics in connection with the term 'communion'.
The phrase 'phatic communion' was introduced by the anthropologist Malinowski (1966: 315) to describe 'a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words'. As Haberland (1966: 164) emphasizes, for Malinowski (1966: 313, 316), the main contrast is between 'communion' and 'communication':
A mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing- room, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant.
Inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things - all such are exchanged not in order to inform, not in this case to connect people in action, certainly not in order to express any thought. . . . [They serve] to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship, (emphasis added)
In other words, the salience of propositional/descriptive/cognitive meaning or information content is minimized in phatic communion, while the relational aspect is positively maximized. Or, as Coupland et al. (1992: 214ff) very aptly put it, phatic communion can be associated with certain priorities in talk, that is a minimal commit- ment to open disclosure, seriousness, factuality, etc. and a foregrounding of positive relational goals.
Using the data set described above, I compared the use of phatic talk in the Greek and German telephone calls, focusing on the section which follows the initial answering, identification and greeting, and which precedes the mention of the reason for calling. The following utterances/features were regarded as phatic:
Ritual questions, e.g. How are you?
Comments on lack of contact, e.g. We haven't met forages.
Ritual expression of wishes, e.g. Happy Birthday!
Apologies for the intrusion, e.g. / hope I didn't wake you up.
Comments on the connection, e.g. This line is very poor.
The joking use of the V-form among intimates, e.g. Ti kanete ciria mu? $What are you doing (V-form) my lady?$
The use of phatic particles, e.g. A/a? Hastdu noch Ga'ste? $PARTICLE? Have you still got guests?$
Counting the number of telephone calls that had one or more of these phatic utter- ances, I found that more than two-thirds of the Greek telephone calls contained them, but only just over one-third of the German calls did so (see Table 6.1).
To explain this result, one might hypothesize that phatic talk is more readily deployed when people call each other primarily for social rather than transactional purposes; so
Table 6.1 Frequency of use of phatic talk in Greek and German telephone openings
Greek German
Conversations with phatic talk
85 (70.83%) 23(37.10%)
Conversations without phatic talk
35(29.17%) 39 (62.90%)
Total
120 62 A / = 182
df=1,X2=17.91,p<.001
1 24 Culturally Speaking
Table 6.2 Distribution of reason for calling in Greek and German telephone calls
Greek calls German calls
Social reason
38(31.67%) 15(24.19%)
Practical reason
82 (68.33%) 47(75.81%)
Total
120 62
df= 1,x2=0.77,p<.5
Table 6.3 Use of phatic utterances according to reason for calling Use of phatic utterances Greek German
Calls for social reasons 34(89.47%) 51(62.20%) Calls for practical reasons 9 (60%) 14 (29.79%)
df= 1,x2=3.25, p<0.100
if Greeks reach more readily for the telephone just to chat or to arrange to meet, this might in turn explain the greater use of phatic talk in Greek openings. Although there is some evidence to support this (both Germans and Greeks used more phatic talk in social calls than in transactional calls), there is no statistically significant difference in the proportion of social and transactional phone calls in the two data sets: both Greeks and Germans made more transactional telephone calls than social calls (see Table 6.2).
Moreover, Greeks still used more phatic sequences in both types of calls than Germans, and the difference was particularly marked for the transactional calls (see Table 6.3).
Another way of explaining the findings shown in Table 6.1 would be by means of Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory: if the caller wants something from the person called (which would constitute a face-threatening act to that person), s/he seeks to mitigate the threat by using phatic talk, that is a positive politeness device. Along this line, the Greeks in the sample could be hypothesized to have used more phatic utter- ances because they made more face-threatening calls than the Germans. But if we investigate, for example the connection between use of phatic talk and the beneficiary of the call in transactional calls, we find that Greeks deploy phatic talk to a great extent even when they are not themselves (at least not exclusively) the beneficiary of the call.
As for the connection between the type of relationship and phatic talk in transac- tional calls, although the results are not statistically significant, in both the Greek and
Table 6.4a Use of phatic talk in Greek telephone openings according to the relationship of the participants (transactional calls only)
Relationship
Personal Familiar Formal
Calls with phatic talk
16(53.33%) 28 (73.68%) 7 (50.00%)
Calls without phatic talk
14(46.67%) 10(26.32%) 7 (50.00%)
Total
30 38 14 82
df=2, %2=4.07, p<0.200
Table 6.4b Use of phatic talk in German telephone openings according to the relationship of the participants (transactional calls only)
Relationship Calls with phatic talk Calls without phatic talk Total
Personal Familiar Formal
3(27.28%) 10(43.48%) 1(7.69%)
8(72.73%) 13(56.52%) 12(92.31%)
11 23 13 47
df=2, r=5.19, p<0.100
the German samples the most extensive use of phatic utterances occurs in relationships that are neither very formal nor too personal; however, the percentage is almost twice as high in the Greek openings in comparison to the German openings, as indicated in Tables 6.4a and 6.4b.