phatic

1. (linguistics) Pertaining to words used to convey any kind of social relationship and whose meaning is otherwise either deemphasized or absent.Examples: "You needn't be angry about the insincerity of shopkeepers' how-are-you greetings. Well-adjusted people understand that the question is phatic in the context and that that's usually no problem."; "Some dialects of a language may use a certain term or phrase in a phatic way, even if other dialects don't."; "Generally speaking, statements in WE are expected to be of a tautologous nature, thus fulfilling the essential phatic nature of speech."