Page 21 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

8 Silence in Intercultural Communication

& Feldstein 1985; Scollon & Scollon 1981; Walker 1985). The second type can
include silence with non-verbal communication such as gestures, but it can also
be silence without any accompanying non-verbal signals. For example, silence
of a child after his/her parent’s question “Have you done your homework?” can
be a communicative act with a propositional meaning of “No.” In other words, it
involves saying something without actually uttering a word, the interpretation of
which requires a high level of reliance on the context of the discourse (cf. Jawor-
ski 1993; Jaworski & Stephens 1998; Saville-Troike 1985). These distinctions de-
scribed above are important in studying the functions and meanings of silence.
The functions of silence investigated in existing literature can be grouped
under the headings cognitive, discursive, social and affective. First, silence phe-
nomena such as pauses and hesitations have been considered to have the func-
tion of earning cognitive processing time in communication. For example, Chafe’s
(1985) work on pauses in retelling a story showed that the lower the codability of
items in the story, the longer the pauses. Moreover, when a change in perspective
occurred in the retelling of the story, longer pauses were found. Sugitō (1991)
looked at the roles of pauses in understanding talk (monologue) in Japanese, and
the results indicated that without pauses listeners have great difficulty in keeping
up with ongoing talk and interpreting it correctly. Thus, pauses play a crucial role
in achieving successful communication in that they allow not only the speaker
time to organise his/her thoughts but also the listener time to understand what
the speaker is saying.
Silence also has a discursive function, which indicates junctures and meaning
or grammatical units in speech. Brown & Yule (1983) claim that units of speech
defined by prosodic features such as tones are often followed by pauses, while Ja-
worski (1993) describes the discursive function of pauses as “defining the bound-
aries of utterance” (p. 12), marking boundaries as a prosodic feature of discourse
(see also Saville-Troike 1985).
Then, there are also the social functions of silence. Using Halliday’s (1978)
terms for the metafunctions of language, Jaworski (2000) claims that silence can
perform the interpersonal metafunction just as small talk does. Examining the
use of silence and small talk in plays as literary sources, Jaworski (2000) shows
how social distance is created, maintained and reduced by silence. Silence can
also affect the formation of impressions in social encounters. An overview of
studies in pauses from psychological perspectives given by Crown & Feldstein
(1985) suggested that length of pauses, as well as overall tempo of speech, can be
associated with personal traits such as extroverted or introverted. Furthermore,
long pauses were associated with the formation of a negative impression of the
speaker. Similarly, in her study of courtroom discourse, Walker (1985) found that
lawyers formed negative impressions of witnesses who had relatively frequent and