PHATIC UTTERANCES AND THE COMMUNICATION OF SOCIAL INFORMATION: A RELEVANCE-THEORETIC APPROACH Manuel Padilla Cruz (University of Seville) Abstract In this paper I offer an approach to the way in which interlocutors can transmit and recover information about the politeness systems (Scollon and Scollon 1983, 1995) in which they are interacting by means of phatic utterances. Based on the Relevance-Theoretic notions of strong and weak implicatures (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002) and on previous works on phatic utterances (Padilla Cruz 2004a, 2004b, 2004c), I argue that the speaker can communicate that information either strongly or weakly, and that the hearer can recover it as strong or weak implicatures that he can combine with other contextual assumptions in order to obtain contextual effects because of the expectations of relevance created by those utterances. Finally, I also include some suggestions about further research in intercultural pragmatics. 1. Perspectives on Phatic Utterances Since Malinowski introduced phatic communion as “[…] a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words” (1923: 478), many of the linguists who have dealt with phatic