Page 46 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 33

1985, 1984). The ethnography of communication explores how, when, with whom
and what meanings are communicated as a norm in a speech community; in other
words, researchers investigate how sentences, exchanges and discourses are struc-
tured and distributed (which is included in the linguistic domain), with whom
and in what situation certain manner and tone of speaking are used (which is in-
cluded in the socio-psychological domain), and what is communicated in certain
situations on the basis of shared knowledge (which is included in the cognitive
domain) (Hymes 1974a, b, Saville-Troike 1985, 1984). There are overlapping fac-
tors in this dimension of the model proposed here, and the categories used here
may possibly be divided into sub-categories. However, for the purpose of present-
ing factors which emerged from my research, and of demonstrating how they
affected silence in intercultural communication, I believe that these categories
offer useful guidelines. The three domains of communication allow a holistic view
of silence when linked to the second dimension of the model (the three levels of
social organisation).
The individual, situational and sociocultural levels of social organisation in
the framework were developed based on my findings from initial ethnographic
interviews and microethnographic case studies, as well as on the view of commu-
nication appreciated by the discipline of the ethnography of communication. Ac-
cording to Saville-Troike (1985), the ethnography of communication is concerned
with “the discovery of the regular patterns and constraints (i.e. rules) that operate
at different levels of communication” (p. 13), which are described as “a societal
level,” “a communicative event” and “the participants” (p. 14). These levels are also
similar to three factors which Sifianou (1997) claims to determine participation
in social interaction: “cultural norms,” “situational norms” and “individual traits,”
in her discussion of silence (p. 63). The tension, which existed among divergent
disciplines of research into talk and its social context in relation to relative impact
of factors operating at these different levels of social organisation, has been raised
as an issue (Coupland et al. 2001; Duranti & Goodwin 1992; Erickson 2004). In
the case of research into intercultural communication, such tension concerns
questions of how much and in what way cultural norms, as opposed to factors
influencing individuals at the local level of interaction, affect the behaviour in,
and outcome of, intercultural encounters. Such tension is precisely what emerged
in the research presented here: Are Japanese students silent because they are fol-
lowing the sociocultural norms which they acquired through their socialisation
in Japan? What roles do local contingencies of talk play in perceptions and per-
formance of silence? What is the role of individual differences, such as personality
and language proficiency? The three-layered dimension was devised to account
for roles of factors at these levels of social organisation.