ABSTRACT
Our intention in this chapter is to elaborate on these ‘classical’ readings of weather talk and recontextualise them. We want, firstly, to ask what precisely is it about the weather that imbues it with the supposed attribute of ‘neutrality’, and to show how weather talk in fact functions relationally in naturally occurring talk. Our data
encounters, where posted servers interact with clients who have, primarily, transactional goals. We try to gain some perspective on how ‘the weather’ in fact features in small talk and on how it is deployed in specific instances. But because our data are specific to travel agencies, we have the opportunity to explore other, less obviously phatic, framings of the topic of ‘weather’ (including ‘climate’, ‘environment’, etc.), where people construct different meanings and values around this theme in their talk. After all, travel agencies and the tourist trade invest heavily in economic formulations of weather and the weather can be very far from an incidental, neutral concern. Observing how weather features in different discursive frames (cf. Goffman 1974; Tannen 1993; Tannen and Wallat, this volume) should help us to identify how the small talk frame for weather is constituted, and what its boundaries are.
