A Study Of Silence In Conversations From The Perspective Of Sino-american Culture

Language has been considered a bridge for people to interact with each other. Nomatter what a speaker’s tone is, or whether the speaker’s voice is loud or low, achoice of word can transmit a message from a speaker. We cannot deny the fact thatspoken language makes a huge difference and it becomes numerous scholars’ studypoints. However, it often occurs to people that there appears silence withinconversation, some even accompanied by gestures, touch and facial expressions, etc.Just as the Chinese saying goes “It is more important to keep silent than speakingnow”, silence does not always mean people’s unwillingness to say anything but meansa way to express views that are difficult to express in words.The study of silence can trace back to the1900s, the beginning of modernlinguistic study. Since the1970s, people have always been focusing on its pragmaticstudy. They mainly study conversational silence, classification and functions ofsilence, and application of silence in class. Later, the scholars bring in “culture” in thestudy of silence. However, these studies incline to description of it. Thus, the authorof this thesis makes a comparative study of English and Chinese silence in dailyconversations. By making a comparison, the author finds out that Chinese use silencemore frequently than Americans do in daily communications. Even though silence isapplied in communication of both cultures, it differs a lot. As a result, analyzingdifferences of silence in Chinese and American conversations and figuring outstrategies to avoid misunderstandings of different silences become the key points ofthe study. This thesis covers four chapters. Chapter One presents a literature review.This paper includes related introduction of silence, covering the definition, motives,and functions of silence, previous studies of silence abroad and at home, aiming atfiguring out how this thesis comes into being. Besides, it includes an analysis of therelationships between silence, conversation and culture. Chapter Two comes to thekey part of this thesis, that is, a comparison of similarities and differences of silencebetween Chinese conversations and American conversations. The cultural causes willbe presented in Chapter Three. According to the inner logic of culture, it can beclassified to four layers, that is, material culture, institutional culture, mentalityculture and behavior culture. Material culture, as a superficial culture, is easy to change. Thus, this thesis chooses to analyze cultural causes of silence from the otherthree culture layers. And the fourth chapter mainly focuses on providing suggestivestrategies for avoiding misunderstandings of silence in Chinese and Americanconversations.The thesis aims at getting people to be aware of the fact that silence can makegreat sense and it deserves people’s attention. The method for this thesis is comparingdifferent film works, because film works originate from daily life. The author hopesthat this study could not only expand the application fields of silence theory, but alsocause people’s attention to the importance of silence and stimulate scholars to studysilence to much further degree.