Harnessing Phatic Capital: Small Talk as Political Strategy in Contemporary Turkish Discourse
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Small talk—brief, relationship‑oriented exchanges frequently dismissed as conversational padding—has become a pivotal resource in Turkish political communication. Grounded in Malinowski’s notion of phatic communion (1923), Jakobson’s phatic function (1960) and Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital (1977), this study investigates how Turkish political actors mobilise small‑talk routines to negotiate solidarity, regulate distance and accumulate symbolic power in semi‑formal settings. A mixed‑methods design combines high‑reliability inductive coding (κ ≈ .80) with register‑based discourse profiling to analyse multimodal interactions captured in television walk‑arounds, informal press gaggles and real‑time social‑media livestreams. Findings reveal an expanding repertoire that ranges from ritual salutations, occupational well‑wishings and kinship vocatives to humour, self‑disclosure, cultural allusions and digitally compressed forms optimised for viral circulation. Political speakers strategically select from this rich small‑talk lexicon to project authenticity, cue shared values or signal dissent, calibrating intimacy and authority in response to shifting media ecologies. By centring micro‑interactional strategies within an explicitly sociolinguistic framework, the article offers a transferable model for examining how languages endowed with extensive phatic resources mediate power in evolving public spheres. The analysis underscores small talk’s capacity to blur the boundary between formal and informal discourse, thereby illuminating subtle mechanisms through which political legitimacy is performed, contested and reconfigured.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16(6), 645-668. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847701600601
Jakobson, R. (1960). “Closing statements: Linguistics and Poetics”. In Sebeok, Thomas Albert (ed.). Style in language. New-York: M.I.T. p. 470.
Malinowski, B. (1923), “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages”, in Charles K. Ogden; Ian A. Richards (eds.), The Meaning of Meaning, London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, pp. 296–336
Keywords: small talk, phatic capital, Turkish, political discourse