The Power Of Silence

The concept of silence is wide-ranging and plays important role with its multiple values and functions in human communication. It implies profound information rather than to be just the blank or pause in the process of communication. Recently scholars of various fields are making elaborate effort on the research of silence.Studies on silence have been carried out from sociology, anthropology, psychology, literal criticism, esthetics points of view. The traditional research attempts to formulate an extended, ultimate definition and identify how it works under varied conditions. As Bilmes in Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning,Dauenhauer in Silence: the Phenomenon and its Ontological Significance and Hall Edward in The Silent Language etc. all interpreted silence from different views. In a more linguistically oriented approach, Bruneau sees silence as defined by language (1973: 20). He points three types of silence: psychological silence, interactive silence and socio-cultural silence. The pragmatic research focuses on its communicative functions and suggests that Grice's Cooperative Principle provides a full-scale to interpret silence since it violates all maxims. Within cognitive research, silence is regarded to be irrelevant to the given context, and have very weak contextual effects. Each research above may focus on certain types or aspects of silence. Besides, domestic research on the subject is comparatively divisive and lacks of deliberate monographs on silence in communication.This thesis therefore is a tentative study of silence in human communication within the framework of pragmatic principles and theories focusing on its...