A Pragmatic Study Of Silence In The Theatre Of The Absurd Waiting For Godot

Generally speaking, human communication falls into two kinds, vocal language and silent language. The former of course contains abundant information, however, the latter is not complete blank because sometimes it also can convey no less information than the former.Research on silence has a wide range involved sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethnography and aesthetics and in recent years it has brought attention to linguistics. The domestic study of silence begins in the1990s, however many scholars just focus on silence’s communicative functions in daily conversation. On the other hand silence in literary works is also covered but is mostly confined to films and novels and few from the perspective of linguistics. Therefore, the present thesis takes Samuel Beckett’s classic work Waiting for Godot as corpus. By elaborating silence’s nature, forms and some characteristics of the theatre of the absurd, it aims at exploring the significance and pragmatic functions of silence in Beckett’s theatre of the absurd.According to the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, the process of communication is an Ostensive-Inferential Model in which the ostensive act includes vocal language or overt act as well as voiceless language or covert act and it is powerful in interpreting silence. Moreover, the Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren is also used to analyze the adaptation between speaker and hearer. Relevance Theory focuses on the theoretical explanation, however, ignores some specific factors such as culture, cognition, and social context, and the Adaptation Theory has a detailed description of the rule of language using but is weak in theoretical explanation.Under the frame of the Adaptation-Relevance Model and in light of the classification of silence made by Levinson (1983), the thesis bases on the specific scenes of silence analyzing the characters’psychological activity and further revealing the generation and understanding process of silence. It turns out that the employment of silence is the result of speaker’s choice-making which breaks the relevance in communication and results in weak-relevance or even non-relevance and sometimes disobeys the adaptation to current context by remaining silent. This incoherence and disharmony in communication is the reflection of characters’chaos and disorder in inner world and it forces hearer to pay extra effort to seek relevance, in this way demonstrating the absurd meaning hidden behind language in the theatre of the absurd. In addition, it is a mutual adaptation between playwright and audience. It reflects in Waiting for Godot in the following aspects:(1) Disappointment at reality,(2) Confusion about time,(3) Adaptation to poetic musicality. All these adaptations show the irreplaceable role of silence in the theatre of the absurd and we can also detect the unique employment of silence of Samuel Beckett.