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
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, “from silencedelimiting 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.
on the basis of a comparatively systematic and comprehensive understanding of the basic knowledge of silence and its communicative functions, we should move to a more important part—grice’s cooperative principle. it serves as the constitutive rule governing conversational exchanges. conversation is generally perceived as a cooperative venture run by maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner, as the cp states. the parties may fail to observe a maxim because they are incapable of speaking clearly and directly or beca
use they deliberately choose for special effects. it has been mentioned that in exchanges, people often resort to indirect linguistic forms (here mainly silence) because there are two goals to be realized—to offer a reply and to fulfill their intended goal as well; and the clash of these two goals results in the exercise of indirectness.
all in all, silence has a special role in verbal communication; it helps conversational partners to exchange more effectively. by complementing verbal behavior, silence forms an indispensable part of linguistic field. as a matter of fact, communication will not be carried on smoothly if silence cannot be interpreted and used correctly.
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