>It doesn't seem to me that communication is sufficiently abstractable
>from the conditions in which it occurs to be the object of a separate
>discipline.
Ok.
> There can be a theory of social relations, which will
>implicitly incorporate analysis of communication, but "theory of
>communication" is incoherent.
Ok.
>How would you apply your analysis to phatic speech? (And note, one of
>the deficiencies of e-list communication seems to be that e-mail
>suppresses all evidence of phatic speech. It simply doesn't exist in
>cyberspace! And yet it is probably the most important use of speech.
>
>Carrol
Right. And the only reason you know that is because you have developed a theory of communication all on your own. There are two kinds of communication: phatic and email. Email excludes the phatic. How is this not an abstraction? (esp. because you are describing to me an aspect of speech which you just claimed doesn't exist in the medium through which you are expressing it).
ken