Comparative Study On Silence In English And Chinese Conversations Based On Relevance Theory

With the rapid development of economy,technology and transportation,the cross-cultural communication has gradually increased,and the effective communication between people of different cultural backgrounds is particularly important.Silence,as a common phenomenon in conversation,gets more and more attention from people.Studies of silence have transformed from viewing silence as completely negative responses at beginning,to recognize its positive side gradually,and then to connect it with cross-cultural communication at present.Although more and more people pay attention to silence,and realize the importance of understanding the meaning of silence in intercultural communication,few people make comparison of the usage of silence in English and Chinese conversations.This thesis starts from this point of view.Since the Relevance Theory studies both explicit and implicit communication and silence is a typical implicit communication,the Relevance Theory can explain the silence in a better way.Therefore,this thesis chooses the Relevance Theory as guiding principle analyzing the silences in both conversations and making comparisons between the findings in both languages.In this paper,the author mainly studies the silences in conversations extracted from English and Chinese TV series.In order to ensure the colloquialism,comparability,and standard of the corpus,this paper selects two popular TV series with a similar theme,and writes down all the silences in the conversations during an equal period of time as research subject.First of all,the types and length of the silences are calculated,and then silences in conversations are analyzed from communicative functions,contexts and relationships between communicators with the direction of the Relevance Theory.At last,the results of Chinese conversations and English conversations are compared.Besides,the author also discusses reasons for the different use of silence in the two languages from traditional culture,values,and such aspects as age,gender and so on.Through the analysis,this paper draws the following conclusions:although in both English and Chinese conversations people will use silences,Chinese people wins with a small advantage,and within-turn silence outnumbers the other types.In Chinese conversations,silence is companied with body language more often than in English conversations,and expresses more positive communicative functions,while the other is the opposite.To understand the meaning of silences in Chinese conversations,people need more efforts and a larger context;the relationship between the communicators will also affect the use of silence in Chinese conversations.This thesis will be of some help in interpreting silence and help to resolve misunderstandings under cross-cultural situations.It can also shed some light on the teaching methods and providing teaching materials for EFL teachers.