Page 44 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 31

Finally, various types of silence in Japanese communication were discussed.
While there has been some evidence to support strong valuing of silence and
extensive use of silence, the lack of sufficient raw data for analysis of silence in
interaction in Japanese as well as the danger of stereotypical and essentialist views
were pointed out.
Although silence has been discussed as having an important role in commu-
nication, silence in communication itself has not been treated widely as a focus
issue. Yet, as we can see in the above review, it is important to recognise its role
and approach it just as we approach talk. As we have seen, there seem to be a
number of methodological problems in the literature to date, such as insufficient
empirical data or reliance on a single approach in interpreting silence. Jaworski &
Sachdev (1998) argue that for studies of silence, “sophistication of a fine-grained,
interdisciplinary analysis” (p. 273) is required. The present research aims to offer
such analysis of silence to overcome the problems found in the existing literature
on silence. The following chapter will describe the approaches to data collection
and analysis embraced in the present research.

2.8 Interpreting silence

2.8.1 A multi-layered model for interpreting silence

The overview of research into silence in communication above shows that silence
plays an important role at various levels of communication. It also shows that the
ambiguous and context-dependent nature of silence may become a source of misun-
derstanding or miscommunication in intercultural communication. Furthermore,
there are a number of factors in different domains of language use which contrib-
ute to such problems in intercultural communication. Since the central concern
of this book is the relationship between perceptions of silence and performance,
there is a need for identifying different types of silence which affects, or becomes
salient in, intercultural communication. For this purpose, I developed an analyti-
cal model incorporating multiple perspectives for approaching and interpreting
silence in intercultural communication, which is presented below. This model will
be the backbone of the analysis and discussion of the data in this book.
The two-dimensional model, on the one hand, includes linguistic, socio-psy-
chological and cognitive domains of communication; on the other hand, it takes
account of different levels of social organisation: the individual, situational and
sociocultural. Factors which affect silence in intercultural communication are
classified into the relevant domains at the appropriate level of social organisation.
These factors emerged from the data in my own studies, and the list may therefore