Pragmatic Analysis Of Silence In The Film Pride And Prejudice

Generally speaking, there are two channels for people to communicate—verbal language and nonverbal language. Verbal language act is performed by people through their languages. Nonverbal language act includes all stimulations and reactions of human and environment except verbal language act. Silence, as one of nonverbal language acts, is very common in our daily communications. It can transmit abundant information, even more efficient and richer than verbal language. Birdwhistell (1970) claims that 65-70% information of our daily communication is conveyed by nonverbal language, and 30-35% information depends on verbal language. Zuo Yan (1996) points out that, in terms of its length (time) in a conversation, silence ranges from 5% to 65%, averaging about 40-50% of a conversation. Since the publication of Hall's (1959) The Silence Language, silence has attracted scholars to implement studies on it from sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, ethnography, pragmatics and esthetics. In China, some researchers began their studies on silence approximately in the 1990's. Most of them study turn silence. In spite of the diversity of the types of silence, the focus of the present research is on conversational silence, i.e. within-turn silence, inter-turn silence and turn silence (Levinson 1983:326).Based on the theoretical framework of Leech's (1983) politeness principle, Brown and Levinson's (1978) face theory, Robin Lakoff's (1977b) politeness rules and Gu Yueguo's (1990) politeness maxims, from the perspective of pragmatics, the study analyzes silences in the English film Pride and Prejudice, explores their functions and dissects the factors affecting the interpretation of silence by employing the qualitative method. By analyzing silence, it is found that silence in the film has many functions such as refusal, contempt, awkward, judgment, etc. Also, there are many factors which can influence the interpretation of silence. They are emotional factors, contextual factors, cultural factors, social factors and ambiguity of silence.The thesis consists of five parts. Chapter 1 is the introduction. It introduces the scope, questions, method of the study and so on. Chapter 2 is the review of previous studies of silence. It deals with definitions, classifications and interpretation of silence. The location and duration of silence are also stated here. Chapter 3 is the theoretical framework. The politeness theories of Leech, Brown and Levinson, Robin Lakoff and Gu Yueguo are listed in this chapter. By analyzing them and compared with each other, it indicates that these theories are very suitable for the analysis of silences. Chapter 4 is the key part of the thesis. It employs qualitative method to analyze three types of silences in the conversations of the film,from which the chapter finds out the satisfactory answers to the research questions mentioned in the first chapter. Chapter 5 is the conclusion. It sums up the findings and implications of the study, also, puts forward the limitations, and makes suggestions for the further study on this topic.The research shows that it is feasible and meaningful to study silences in conversations by applying pragmatic theories. While the study has its limitations, it might bring the implications to foreign language teaching, cross-cultural interactions and the further study on this topic.