A Study of Phatic Function Employed by The Characters in Life of Pie Movie

Abstract

Human communication has various function such as delivering information, expressing feeling, giving suggestion and even maintaining social relationship. This is called as phatic communication. Phatic communication does not fully present the informative conversation, in the contrary it contains a function for the daily communication. Even though the phatic communication does not concern about the exchange of substantive information to interlocutor, it is focus on the type of communication of keeping the open communication and strengthening the relationship. Therefore, the aims of this research are to find and to analyze the types and the roles of phatic function. While the research significances, first as the theoretically is to contribute knowledge about phatic communication in linguistics studies field, additionally this research is expected as the additional resource for other researchers who interested to conduct the same research topic about phatic communication. This research used the theory from Laver (1975) to answer the research questions, while the ground theory is from Malinowski (1923). This research used qualitative method. Qualitative research involves to discover of the language phenomenon. In addition, the data were taken from Life of Pi movie. As the conclusion, the researcher found 57 data. There are divided into three types of phatic function, neutral (13 data), self-oriented (16 data), other-oriented (28 data). In addition, the roles of phatic function, there were opening phase (24 data), medial phase (33 data) and the last was the closing phase data which were not found in this movie.