The Seventh Function of Language

• The “phatic” function is the most amusing. This is the function that envisages communication as an end in itself. When you say “hello” on the telephone, you are saying nothing more than “I’m listening,” i.e., “I am in a situation of communication.” When you chat for hours in a bar with your friends, when you talk about the weather or last night’s soccer game, you are not really interested in the information per se, but you talk for the sake of talking, without any objective other than making conversation. In other words, this function is the source of the majority of our verbal communications.

• The “metalinguistic” function is aimed at verifying that the sender and the receiver understand each other, i.e., that they are using the same code. “You understand?,” “You see what I mean?,” “You know?,” “Let me explain…”; or, from the receiver’s point of view, “What are you getting at?,” “What does that mean?,” etc. Everything related to the definition of a word or the explanation of a development, everything linked to the process of learning a language, all references to language, all metalanguage, is the domain of the metalinguistic function. A dictionary’s sole function is metalinguistic.

• And finally, the last function is the “poetic” function. This considers language in its aesthetic dimension. Plays on the sounds of words, alliteration, assonance, repetition, echo or rhythm effects, all belong to this function. We find it in poems, of course, but also in songs, oratory, newspaper headlines, advertising, and political slogans.

Jacques Bayard lights a cigarette and says, “That’s six.”

“Sorry?”

“That’s six functions.”

“Ah … yes. Quite.”

“Isn’t there a seventh function?”

“Well, uh … apparently, there is, yes…”

Simon smiles stupidly.

Bayard wonders out loud what Simon is being paid for. Simon reminds him that he did not ask for anything and that he is there against his will, on the express orders of a fascist president who sits at the head of a police state.

Nevertheless, after thinking about it, or rather after rereading Jakobson, Simon Herzog does come up with a possible seventh function, designated as the “magic or incantatory function,” whose mechanism is described as “the conversion of a third person, absent or inanimate, to whom a conative message is addressed.” And Jakobson gives as an example a Lithuanian magical spell: “May this stye dry up, tfu tfu tfu tfu.” Yeah yeah yeah, thinks Simon.

He also mentions this incantation from northern Russia: “Water, queen of rivers, aurora! Take the sadness beyond the blue sea, to the bottom of the sea, and never let it weigh down the happy heart of God’s servant…” And, for good measure, a citation from the Bible: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed” (Joshua 10:12).

Fair enough, but that all sounds pretty anecdotal. You can’t really consider it a separate function; at most, it is a slightly crazy use of the conative function for an essentially cathartic effect, poetic at best, but completely ineffective: the magical invocation works only in fairy tales, by definition. Simon is convinced that this is not the seventh function of language, and in any case Jakobson only mentions it in passing, in the interests of completeness, before returning to his serious analysis. The “magical or incantatory function”? A negligible curiosity. A nonsensical footnote. Nothing worth killing for, in any case.

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“By the spirits of Cicero, tonight, let me tell you, my friends, it is going to rain enthymemes! I can see some have been revising their Aristotle, and I know some others who know their Quintilian, but will that be enough to overcome the lexical snares in the slalom race of syntax? Caw caw! The spirit of Corax is speaking to you. Glory to the founding fathers! Tonight, the victor will win a trip to Syracuse. As for the defeated … they will have their fingers trapped in the door. Well, it’s always better than your tongue … And don’t forget: today’s orators are tomorrow’s tribunes. Glory to the logos! Long live the Logos Club!”

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