Page 22 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 9

long silent pauses, although they advised witnesses to use pauses to think care-
fully before they responded to questions. Therefore, we see in this instance the
clash between silence as a means for cognitive processing and silence as a factor in
impression management. As Tannen (1985) says, following Allen (1978), silence
has two opposite valuations – “one negative – a failure of language – and one posi-
tive – a chance for personal exploration” (p. 94).
The literature also discusses how silence serves to form conversational styles
(Saville-Troike 1985; Tannen 1984, 1985). Tannen (1985) demonstrated how fea-
tures of discourse such as preference of overlap to silent switching pauses and rel-
atively fast rate of speech characterise the conversational style of New York Jewish
people. Her analysis of interaction over a Thanksgiving dinner among three New
Yorkers, two Californians and one Briton showed that the two groups had differ-
ent conversational styles characterised by different levels of tolerance of silence.
Moreover, as Scollon & Scollon (1981, 1983), and Scollon (1985) argue, different
orientations to silence can become a cause of negative stereotyping.
Silence can also be a means of social control. In the Akan community in
Ghana where community members refuse to talk to “people who violate socio-
cultural norms” to deter “future violators” (Agyekum 2002: 39), silence is used for
punishment. The Igbo community in Nigeria is also reported to have the same use
of silence (Nwoye 1985). Similarly in Western Apache country, people who are
‘enraged’ are not spoken to by others as talking to them may cause violence (Basso
1972: 77). Silence as a means of social control can also take place in the form
of censorship (e.g. Galasiński & Galasińska 2005; Thiesmeyer 2003). Jaworski &
Galasiński (2000) argued that silencing by “omission” and “ambiguation” through
censorship in Poland was a way for the regime to “preserve its political power”
(p. 198). Such examples of silence sanctioning and controlling show silence not
simply functioning as a background to speech but taking an active role in social
interaction.
Another aspect of the social function of silence is defining or maintaining
role relationships and negotiating power. For instance, in the Akan community,
the king uses silence to mark his “power, authority, rank and status” (Agyekum
2002: 42). However, the use of silence can mark not only authority but also subor-
dination, which is illustrated by Lebra’s (1987) explanation:

[...] silence is an inferior’s obligation in one context and a superior’s privilege in
another, symbolic of a superior’s dignity in one instance and of an inferior’s hu-
mility in another. (Lebra 1987: 351)
This contradictory aspect of silence indicates the complex and context-dependent
nature of silence in communication. Kurzon (1992, 1997) also argues that while
questioning in one-on-one situations gives power to the questioner, the respon-