Elevator small talk in Peninsular Spanish: Phatic speech acts within the ritual frame of casual encounters in the elevator

Abstract

The present study offers a speech-act analysis of the phatic interaction taking place within the ritual frame of casual encounters in the elevator. The corpus consists of 70 encounters that took place in Madrid, Spain, between 2020 and 2023. The analysis draws from Edmondson & House's (1981) originally proposed interactional typology of speech acts, also found in House & Kádár (2021a, 2023) and Edmondson, House & Kádár (2022). The main findings show, among other things, that some acts that are not conceived as phatic in the typology can migrate into the phatic slots, and that the speech-act pattern of this type of encounters can be affected by sociopragmatic variables such as the relational history of the interactants, or the co-created humorous episodes in the encounters.