Interpretations of silence from pragmatic perspective

Abstract:“Silence”, which is one pervasive communicative phenomenon in all nationalities, has rich utterance meanings and powerful communicative functions. Interpreting and using silence correctly will make exchange more smoothly and mutual understanding easier.

Key words: silence；communicative functions；Cooperative Principle

中图分类号：H08 文献标识码：Ａ

文章编号：1005-5312（2012）21-0107-01

Silence, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, has naturally stimulated most researchers to further efforts. Philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and linguists as well have attempted to define silence by clarifying its varied forms, presenting a variety of functions and other distinctive aspects. This paper dwells on the discussion of the communicative functions and implicatures of silence in conversation, which will help us interpret silence in conversation more effectively, and Grice’s Cooperative Principle will be employed.

It might seem obvious that silence is simply a well-understood concept that pervades human interaction. Silence as an intended act of not speaking is common in many cultures. Traditionally, within the field of linguistics, silence has been defined as boundary-mark, “delimiting the beginning and end of utterances”, negatively the absence of speech or inaction, or background to speech. In fact, silence is the absence of something else: abstaining from speech or utterance, sometimes with reference to a particular matter, the state or condition when nothing is audible, omission of mention or notice. Based on the definition, we should discuss from the pragmatic perspective.

In the first place, the social-norm view, as the term suggests, reflects the historical understanding of silence generally embraced by the public. Silence provides nonverbal clues to the cultural beliefs and activities of a given group. We find that the interpretation of silence lies in two conflicting yet simultaneous views of silence; one positive, and one negative.

In the second place, we should mention the face-saving view. As is known to us, silence can perform a “speech act ”and be used to question, promise, deny, request, or command, silent communicative acts may be analyzed as having perlocutionary effect, and the meaning of silence in interaction, like other features of discourse ,can be understood to grow out of the two overriding goals of human communication.

The silence in conversation at a given time may have multiple functions. It may not only give times for speaker encoding, but also be benefit for hearer decoding. Besides, silence may also play many communicative functions at the same time, or may be used by the speaker to express some certain meaning. So in this sense, the functions of silence in conversation cannot be detached. In a silence, there may be more than one functions act.