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Analysis of Silence Phenomenon and Its Cultural Difference from Pragmatic Perspectives

Author: JiangWenZuo
Tutor: LiuWenHua
School: Dongbei University of Finance
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Silence Conversational Analysis Cooperative Principle Politeness Principle Relevance Theory
CLC: H030
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2010
Downloads: 258
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Abstract

Just like speech, silence is also one of the mediums of human communication. Silence and speech are both signs in essence. But silence has traditionally long stayed out-of-awareness and been defined negatively—as merely the absence of speech, thus as absence of communication. It is the combination of silence and speech that realizes the human communication. Verbal language is an important way to communicate. At the same time, silence, a main act of nonverbal communication, can convey rich meanings, depending on situations, contextual and social-cultural norms of interpretation. Birdwhistell (1970) pointed out that 60%-70% information of our daily communication is conveyed by nonverbal language, and 30%-35% information depends on verbal language.Silence has long enjoyed popularity among the scholars of various fields. Studies on silence have been carried out from sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and esthetics points of view. The traditional research attempts to formulate an extended, ultimate definition and identify how it works under varied conditions. The pragmatic research concentrates on its communicative functions and argues that Grice’s Principle (CP) is the whole story for its interpretation since silence violates the maxims. The cognitive research holds that silence seems to be irrelevant to the given context in light of Grice’s maxim of relevance, and hence have very weak contextual effects. Thus, in order to provide a rather-new perspectives to explore the power of silence in human communication, such profound pragmatic principles as the Conversational Analysis, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Leech’s Politeness Principle, as well as Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory are applied respectively.For students of English and linguistic, it is very important to apply linguistic theories to daily communication. Though most of people’s attention focuses on verbal communication, nonverbal language as a means of exchange should not be ignored. With its high position in the total framework of human communication, silence, along with its strategic uses and functions, merits to be studied. So correct understanding of these signals will help people improve effectiveness of communication.However, in different areas and different cultures, people value silence in a totally different way. Generally speaking, eastern people use it more frequently, understand it more easily, and sometimes value it as being more important. We can find many examples in business negotiations, classrooms, and in daily life. This is mostly because of the different histories and the cultural-contexts of eastern and western culture. In order to avoid misunderstanding each other in international communication, people should pay more attention to the differences about silence and try to get used to other people’s speaking habits and customs, and we should take appropriate action to make our international communication more effectively, which is just the purpose and practical significance of the thesis.The thesis consists of six chapters. The first part introduces the phenomenon of silence, and sketches out the thesis about its aim, scope and significance. The second part gives a literature review of silence, which discusses different perspectives of silence from aboard and at home. The third part provides a basic knowledge of silence which deals with the notion by defining it, giving classification and discussing the relationship between silence and speech. The four part, as the most important one, introduces some related theories such as:conversation analysis, cooperative principle, politeness principle and relevance theory to increase our understanding of silence phenomenon in a broad and comprehensive perspectives. The five part is the combination of silence phenomenon and cultural difference, mainly discusses the cultural difference between eastern and western culture. In order to lessen the misunderstanding and conflict and improve effective interaction in international communication, we should know more about silence and cultural difference. The six part, that is last chapter, summarizes the whole thesis and states the deficiency of the study, at the same time, it put forward further suggestions in order to stimulate further research on the topic.

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