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Keep silent or keep talking!: Remarks on silence in Romanian culture
Abstract
The paper approaches silence as a pragmatically relevant component of the dialogue. My aim is to illustrate the diversity of meanings and functions silence can discursively actualize, depending on the communicative situation. As a collectivistic, relationship oriented culture, Romanian culture is characterized by a preference for positive politeness strategies and accordingly by silence avoidance. Special attention will be given to the social, cultural, and individual parameters which determine the speaker to prefer silence to speech, as well as to the receiver’s position towards silence (accepted, rejected, or requested silences). I shall also have in view the relationship between the influence of individual factors and the socio-cultural tradition in actualizing silence. The data are excerpted from some corpora of spoken Romanian, as well as from a number of literary texts, given the fact that usually the latter reflect the prototypical behaviour of certain social groups or of some representatives of these groups.
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The theoretical and empirical research on the use of communicative silence in human interaction reveals sustained scholarly interest in the topic. Yet, very little research attention has focused on how married couples use this phenomenon in their relationships. Thus, we have a superficial understanding of, for example, the functional uses of silence as conflict management tactic in such relationships. This paper attempts to broaden further our understanding of how participants, in a previous study, used silence to negotiate some of the conflicts that arose in their relationships. From this perspective, the paper elaborates on prior identified themes as well as discusses an additional theme that was found in the interview data. The overall aim of the paper then, is to engender interest into this domain of silence usage.
The article presents a typology of silence in social interaction, based on a number of features, including the number of participants in the interaction, the identity of the text that is left unsaid, and the intention of the silent person. Four types are proposed—conversation, thematic, textual and situational. Since conversational silence has been extensively discussed elsewhere, the focus of the article is on the other three types, and several problematic cases are discussed concerning not only the classification of instances of silence but also whether what has been called silence is in effect silence. The types of silence are illustrated by examples such as silence in the library, during classroom lessons, in political speeches, remembrance ceremonies, and theatrical and musical performances.
This theoretically motivated approach to pragmatics (vs. semantics) produces a radically new view of culture and its role vis-a-vis society. Understanding what words mean in use requires an open-ended recourse to pragmatic cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge makes up a productive conceptual system. Members of a cultural community share the system but not all of the system's content, making culture a system of parallel distributed cognition. This book presents such a system, and then elaborates a version of "cultural models" that relates actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and that allows both systematic generative capacity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups. Such models are offered as the basic units of cultural action. Culture thus conceived is shown as a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches. © 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
Cambridge Core - Semantics and Pragmatics - Pragmatics - by Stephen C. Levinson
The roles of eloquent silence in each of the six functions of language in Roman Jakobson's communicative model (1960) are considered. First, pause, being outside language, is differentiated from (eloquent) silence, a means chosen by the speaker for significant verbal communication alongside speech; it is not the listener's silence nor the silencing of the speaker. Linguistic and non-linguistic contributions to the study of eloquent silence are then briefly reviewed. Next, the roles of eloquent silence in Jakobson's model are analyzed. (Eloquent) silence, as a linguistic sign, conveys information in the referential function (zero-sign and passive constructions); it is an iconic affective way of expressing emotions (e.g., emptiness, intimacy) in the emotive function. In respect of the conative function, (eloquent) silence performs direct and indirect speech acts. Caesura, metaphors and ellipses are just a few examples of poetic silence. Silence is a means of maintaining contact and alliance in the phatic function. The various roles of silence in the metalinguistic function range from its being a discourse marker to reflecting the ‘right to silence’.
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