Silence: Its Strategy And Function In Interpersonal Communication

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. Silence, as a meaningful component of human interaction, has started to attract the attention of linguists, whereas it has been a concern of anthropologist, psychologist and philosophers for much longer. The traditional research attempts to formulate an extended, ultimate definition and identify how it works under varied conditions. With its high position in the total framework of human communication, silence, along with its strategic uses and functions, merits to be studied. This is the basic point on which this thesis embarks.The title of the thesis suggests that the present research, on the basis of previous studies, revisits the interpretation of silence in human communication from pragmatic and social perspectives. By analyzing the uses of silence in everyday interpersonal communication generally and the teacher silences in a certain context—classroom particularly, the thesis tries to prove that silence is also one of the effective communication strategies which can benefit communication and help to achieve the communication goals if being used and understood appropriately both in daily communication context and in education settings.The thesis consists of six chapters. Beginning with communication strategies, Chapter One deals with silence in two-dimensional framework of communication and then studies the relationship between speech and silence. Chapter Two reviews historical researches from different perspectives, in the meantime, the main idea of this thesis is briefly introduced. Chapter Three discusses the types of silence and elicits the dominating kind of silence—communicative silence, which is the emphasis of this thesis. This chapter, based on the classification of communicative silence, discusses the use of silence and its functions. The fact that silence is a communication strategy with plenty of rich meaning is fully manifested. The first three chapters provide an overall understanding of silence based on which the thesis proceeds. Chapter Four explores factors affecting the interpretation of silence and factors affecting the interpretation of silence respectively. Chapter Five focuses on the strategic use of the teacher silences in classroom. The last chapter summarizes the whole thesis and the major findings on the topic,and restresses the main theme of the paper: to enhance the awareness of silence and strategic use of silence can promote human communication both in daily communication context and in education settings. At last, the deficiency of the study is stated and further suggestions are put forward in order to stimulate further research and thought on the topic.