The Study Of Turn Silence In English And Chinese Conversational Discourse From The Perspective Of Cognitive Pragmatics

Generally speaking, there are two kinds of "languages" we use in our daily communication—verbal language and nonverbal language. Verbal language is an important way to communicate. At the same time, silence, a main act of nonverbal communication, can transmit rich meanings, depending on situations, contextual and social-cultural norms of interpretation. Birdwhistell (1970) pointed out that 60-70% information of our daily communication is transmitted by nonverbal language, and 30-35% information depends on verbal language. As the most prototypical nonverbal communicative language, in terms of its length (time) in a conversation, silence ranges from 5% to 65%, averaging about 40-50% of a conversation (Zuo Yan, 1996).With the birth of Hall's (1959) The Silent Language, non-verbal behavior has come to attract researchers' attention and become an integral part of sociolinguistics, anthropology, psychology, literature, religion and so on. Silence, the main act of nonverbal communication, has also attracted their interests. Unfortunately, the previous studies have the following weak points: very scattered, but not systematical;only making objective descriptions, but ignoring the theoretical analysis.It is approximately in the 1980's when the research of nonverbal communication started in China. The current domestic research on silence is still in its initial phase. Frankly speaking, only a few articles have been published (Hu Wenzhong, 1995;Yang Ping, 1996;Zuo Yan, 1996;Song Li, 1998) on silence in communication. The domestic study of silence in communication, a fertile land with abundant resources but not fully cultivated, calls for much awareness of this universal aspect of human behavior. To make up for the weak points of the previous studies of silence, I wish this thesis, to some extent, could answer the call.According to Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986), verbalcommunicative process is, in fact, an ostensive—inferential communication, which is defined as "the communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest to the communicator and the audience that the communicator intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions."Relevance theory aims to interpret this communicative process, including the overt parts of communication as well as the covert ones. It is very clear that the information contained in turn silence is prototypical covert information. So theoretically speaking, relevance theory can be used to explain turn silence.Relevance theory aims to answer psychological questions about the way the interpretation proceeds in the audience's mind as well as philosophical questions about the nature of communication. Relevance is seen as a property of inputs to cognitive process: utterance, thoughts, memories, actions, sounds, sights, smells, and so on. An input is relevant to an individual when its process in a context of available assumptions yields a positive cognitive effect. A positive cognitive effect is a worthwhile difference to the individual's representation of the world. On the basis of preposition, frame, knowledge script and psychological schema, the audience will reestablish an integrated and complicated cognitive context according to the ongoing communication, which is helpful for him to interpret the rich meaning of turn silence.This thesis consists of five chapters, including introduction and conclusion.Chapter One is Introduction. The various definitions of silence defined by four well-known dictionaries urged me to think about "silence" carefully. At the same time, silence, the most prototypical nonverbal communicative way, is a common phenomenon in English and Chinese conversational discourses, and plays an important role in the smooth communication. This is the practical meaning of my study.This chapter also introduces the purpose and the significance of the study. The data will be collected from our ordinary conversations, novels and magazines,which possess the strong characteristics of spoken language.Chapter Two is the Review of Previous Study. This chapter focused on the interdisciplinary study of silence abroad and the current study of silence at home.Chapter Three is Turn-silence and Conversational Discourse. Firstly, this chapter introduces turn-taking and its rules, which are closely related to the various silences in our daily communication. According to different criteria, scholars abroad and at home classified silence carefully, including turn silence in their classification. Then, it pointed out the shortcomings about the study of silence from the conversational analysis approach and Grice's Cooperative Principles. In a word, the former researchers limited their studies of turn silence in the pragmatic frame of conversational structure, which was reasonable and doubtlessly correct. Their studies, however, were carried out on the surface level of conversational structure, without a deep study of the communicators' psychological level, without exploring their psychological activities when communication occurred and without necessarily cognitive explanation.Chapter Four is the key part of my thesis. This chapter introduced Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory and the knowledge of context and contextual effects systematically and completely. On the basis of relevance theory and the knowledge of cognitive context, integrating with plenty of examples of English and Chinese conversational discourse, this chapter explored the psychological process of the communicator in interpreting the rich meaning of turn silence. Three parts of this chapter are essential to the interpretation: turn silence's informative intention and communicative intention;turn silence's relevance;turn silence's contextual effects. It also discussed turn silence from the cross-cultural perspective briefly.Chapter Five is Conclusion. This chapter, firstly, discussed the implications of the study: turn silence in our language class. To interpret the teachers' and the students' turn silence is very helpful and important to our language teaching, especially in the cross- cultural language class. And then, it presented a briefsummary of my study. At last, this chapter pointed out the limitations and further study. It is an open and systematical project to explain the implicature of turn silence effectively. We have to integrate the micro-theories of pragmatics (discourse analysis, cooperative principle, politeness theory and indirect speech act, and so on) with other concerning knowledge (sociology, anthropology, psychology and logic), with the guide of relevance theory, to achieve our goal.