A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Conversational Silence

Silence has traditionally long stayed out of awareness and been defined negatively—as merely the absence of speech or communication. Yet, it occupies an important position in the total framework of human communication and is worth studying from many angles. This is the basic point on which the thesis embarks. As the title reveals, the author is to approach silence, in particular conversational silence, mainly in light of relevance theory.To begin with, the author introduces the concept of silence by adopting an eclectic view and considering it as a diverse and unifying concept. The review of previous research reveals many aspects of the study on silence. The universality and uniqueness of silence for people from different backgrounds is elaborated respectively. While people use silence to signal certain meaning in the same way, silence can be very different in specific cultural settings. To prove this, the thesis lists the contrasting points between Chinese and American stereotypes in the domain of silence. According to the available literature, silence can be interpreted with different theoretical approaches, from linguistics, sociology, ethnography to pragmatics and aesthetics. As to the function of silence, there have already been some verdicts categorized systematically on one hand. On the other, due to the special form silence lies in and the limit of human cognitive capacity, it is out of the question to reveal every aspect of a silence or every silent act in human communication. Sociologists, ethnologists, pragmatists and the other scholars have made contributions to the study of silence, but there is still a gap yet to fill in.The theoretical framework for the analysis of most data in this thesis is relevance theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995). As a cognitive psychological theory, it first treats either verbal utterance or nonverbal act as a cognitive process. The thesis presents the relation between relevance and communication, relevance and cognition, and relevance and comprehension, in hope of guiding the application of the theory intothe specific analysis. As an ostensive-inferential act, silence can convey the informative and communicative intentions of the communicator by sufficient processing efforts, from which contextual effect arises. To strengthen the validity of the theoretical approach, some instances of silence are presented and analyzed.Specific cases of conversational silence in the classic film Waterloo Bridge serve as the data. The forms of silence from a general view are displayed immediately after the brief introduction of the plot. For convenience's sake, main applications of relevance theory concerning silence are analyzed separately at first. The author not only approaches the communication within and without the film by applying the informative and communicative intentions realized by the silence act but also touches upon the three types of contextual effect silence provides: contextual implication, strengthening and eliminating a former assumption. The continuum of the degrees of relevance is also discussed in brief to help the audience follow the development of the plot regardless of serious or slight misunderstanding. The author also adopts comprehensive view based on relevance theory through an all-round analysis of a specific scene.Throughout the study, the thesis attempts to stress the indispensability of silence in human communication. Having adopted a new approach to and a detailed analysis of silence under the guideline of relevance theory, the author finally calls for a cross-disciplinary, comprehensive, and complementary study on silence.