The author aims at a linguistically adequate description of the discourse type `phatic discourse', often referred to as `small talk'. After exploring pretheoretical notions of small talk, the author outlines a multi-layered model of spoken discourse which attempts to integrate findings from various disciplines, including AI research. The analyses are based on a corpus of recorded conversations and concentrate on four areas: politeness maxims, interactional and illocutionary patterns, topic organization, and a frame model of topic selection and topic development.