Communicative Functions Of Silence And Its Conversational Implicature

For students of English and linguistics, 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. Other than verbal language, nonverbal language continues sending signals, and most of these signals are sent to conversational partners unconsciously. So correct understanding of these signals will help people improve effectiveness of communication.Silence which occurs very often in verbal communication composes the major part of paralanguage. It sends various messages nonverbally when presented in different forms and positions. Silence is an equally valid and complementary category of speech. Silence may occur either between turns of talking or just within a turn of talking, or even just as a turn itself, which is called turn silence. The different positions of silence imply different meanings. Silence also relates to speaker's personality traits, such as anxiety degrees and extroversion or introversion. Individual's use of silence correlates not only with his or her own habitation, but also with the person's cultural background. Interpreting and using silence correctly will make exchange (interpersonal or intercultural) more smoothly and mutual understanding easier.The focus of the thesis is the communicative functions of silence and its conversational implicature, which will benefit our use and interpretation of silence in communication. And the thesis falls into five parts. The first part introduces the phenomenon of silence, and sketches out the thesis about its scope, aim, and organization. The second part gives a literature review of silence, which discusses several aspects of silence. It deals with the notion of silence by defining it, making some distinctions and discussing the relationship between silence and speech. And then it reviews historical researches, specifically four existing approaches, examines and points out the merits and in some detail, demerits of the studies. The third part discusses several different types of classifications of silence and gives out an analysis of several examples of silences in Sons and Lovers by D. H, Lawrence to obtain and summarize the communicative functions of silence. The fourth part mainly deals with the implications of silence in conversation. In doing this, we refer to Grice's Cooperative Principle, which is the fundamental guideline in studying human conversations. But because the indirectness in silence results in the violation of conversational maxims, the thesis then explains the reasons why the speaker exercises silence to convey messages, and elicits Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory, which helps us a lot to analyze the conversational implicatures of silence. After that a comparatively comprehensive discussion on the factors, which play a negative role in our interpretation of silence, is given out. At the end of this part, the thesis discusses the implicatures of silence in conversation through an analysis of Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence. The last part summarizes the major findings on the topic and puts forward further suggestions in order to stimulate further research and thought on the topic.