Silence In Interpersonal Communication: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Perspective

Silence has long enjoyed popularity among the scholars of various fields. 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 Cooperative 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 week contextual effects. Each research above may focus on certain types of silence and illustrate some aspects. Then questions arise: why does the "speaker" within conversation resort to silence at the price of violating these principles? How does the "hearer" make sense of the silence? On the basis of previous studies, the present research revisits the interpretation of silence from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective.The thesis supports that indirectness is the innate nature of silence, which inevitably results in the violation of the maxims and the principle of relevance, and argues that a "speaker" may choose to or be forced to employ this extreme manifestation of indirectness, namely silence, because what he or she wishes to convey is inexpressible. The thesis also points out that as long as communication has been initiated, the "speaker" tries his or her best to make the information accessible to the "hearer" while the "hearer" tends to regard silence as maximally relevant in the context, in line with Sperber & Wilson's RT in which the notion "relevance" is the key to account for the mechanisms governing the use of silence.