To speak or not to speak: notes on silence as a dialog speech act (original) (raw)

Silence has been discussed as an important resource of interaction, a pragmatically relevant component of interaction (Jaworski 1997), which has a specific interactional background, being more context-embedded than speech (Tannen 1985, Sifianou 1997). I start from the premise that silence and speech are not contradictory categories, but they are integrated within a continuum. I also consider that silence is an integrative part of human communication and I will dwell upon the idea that eloquent silence (Sifianou 1997, Ephratt 2008) can be considered a dialogic speech act (Weigand 2010) since the speaker has specific intentions, goals, purposes and interests in using silence both as action, to make a claim, and reaction, to fulfil a claim. Using examples from transcriptions of naturally-occurring conversations, I discuss silence as an intentional and purposeful action by which an individual can convey meaningful messages.