Page 24 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 11

avoiding imposition, it can also be “the least polite” form because it “places high
inferential demands on the addressee” (p. 73). Talk and silence in relation to polite-
ness strategies are also discussed by Scollon & Scollon (1995), who list “Be voluble”
as one of the positive (in their term, involvement) strategies and “Be taciturn” as
one of the negative (independence) strategies (p. 40, 41). However, they do not
explicitly indicate solidarity-oriented silence as a positive politeness strategy.
Silence as a politeness strategy can also be used in communication by people
who have a limited verbal communication capacity. Jaworski & Stephens (1998)
revealed that avoidance of talk was used not only to avoid loss of face due to their
inability to capture the speech content but also to avoid imposition on others by
requiring them to repeat their speech. Thus, silence in this case is used as a ‘Don’t
do the FTA’ and a negative politeness strategy at the same time. Drawing on a
study by Gass & Varonis (1991), Jaworski & Stephens (1988) also suggest that
non-native speakers may, like hearing-impaired people, prevent loss of face by
avoiding asking native speakers to repeat.
Finally, silence can also have a role in the management and display of emo-
tion. For example, Saunders (1985) describes how serious emotional conflict
within a family can be avoided by family members’ use of silence in an Italian
village. Avoidance of talk with a person who is extremely angry among the West-
ern Apache mentioned earlier (Basso 1972) is also a way of managing intense
emotional states.
As shown above, silence has almost as many functions as speech, although
only those which are of importance for ensuing discussions in this book were dis-
cussed. The multifaceted and ambiguous nature of silence described above sug-
gests that research into the phenomenon of silence requires multiple perspectives
and approaches to reach a reliable interpretation and understanding. The follow-
ing is a summary of the functions of silence discussed above:
1. cognitive
– pauses, hesitations for cognitive/language processing
2. discursive
– marking boundaries of discourse
3. social
– negotiating and maintaining social distance
– impression management through pause length, frequency and speed of
talk
– conversational styles through pause length, frequency, speed of talk and
overlapping
– means of social control through avoiding verbal interaction with specific
individuals