Page 25 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

12 Silence in Intercultural Communication

– means of maintaining power through avoiding certain content of verbal
expressions
– means of maintaining and reinforcing power relationship
– means of negotiating power
– politeness strategies (negative, positive, off-record, Don’t do FTA)
4. affective
– means of emotion management

2.3 Silence in intercultural communication

It has been claimed that members of a speech community share culture-specific
uses of silence just as they do other linguistic features (Saville-Troike 1985; En-
ninger 1987; Jaworski 1993), and a large proportion of ethnographic studies have
exemplified this (e.g. Agyekum 2002; Basso 1972; Nwoye 1985; Saunders 1985;
Scollon & Scollon 1983). It has also been suggested that children are socialised to
community-specific uses of silence, from an early age, in particular in their family
environment (Saville-Troike 1985; e.g. Clancy 1986; Lehtonen & Sajavaara 1985;
Philips 1972, 1983; Scollon & Scollon 1981). In addition, as Saville-Troike explains,
the learning and use of silence may also be more unconscious than speech:

Learning appropriate rules for silence is also part of the acculturation process for
adults attempting to develop communicative competence in a second language
and culture. Perhaps because it functions at a lower level of consciousness than
speech, many (perhaps most) otherwise fluent bilinguals retain a foreign ‘accent’
in their use of silence in the second language, retaining native silence patterns
even as they use the new verbal structures. (p. 12–13)

Furthermore, the interpretation of silence, the same type of speech event, may
vary across speech communities. An example given by Saville-Troike (1985),
based on Williams (1979) and Nwoye (1978), is that a woman’s silence following
a marriage proposal by a man is interpreted as an acceptance in Japanese, but a
rejection in Igbo (p. 9). The non-verbal expressions accompanying silence also
have an important role in the interpreting process, and these expressions can also
be culturally fine-tuned features of communication (e.g. Harumi 1999, see below
for details). What follows is a brief overview of studies which looked at culture-
specific forms, functions and interpretations of silence which may become a cause
of misunderstanding in intercultural communication.
In terms of silence at a level of localised interaction, norms of pause length
across cultures are one of the most contentions issues in the field (e.g. Carbaugh &
Poutiainen 2000; Enninger 1987; Jaworski 1993; Kurzon 1997; Lehtonen & Saja-