Discourse Analysis Of "Silences" In Harold Pinter's Dramas

There are two kinds of silences in Harold Pinter's dramas: one is acoustic silence when no word is spoken;the other is contextual silence which contains a torrent of words.In terms of studies on silence,most scholars tend to focus more on Pinter's early-and middle-time plays,namely comedies of menace and memory plays,overlooking silence usages in Pinter's late political plays.Although fewer silences are used in political plays,they are still worth studying.This thesis analyzes two of Pinter's representative late political plays,Mountain Language(1988)and Ashes to Ashes(1996),which are interrelated in theme expressions and character constructions.Through discourse analysis,the author adopts qualitative and quantitative methods and combines Pragmatic Act Theory,Pragmatic Ambivalence and Turn-Taking as the frameworks for the first time to further illustrate what communicative functions do two kinds of “silences” have in the two plays.By taking the social background and the playwright's life experience into account,the author figures out that silences are viewed as pragmatic acts both on character-character level and reader-playwright level.To be specific,silences function as psychological acts,intentional acts,indirect speech acts,thematic acts,poetic acts and dramatic acts and they contribute a lot to the conflicts between characters,personal traits,power relationship change,plot development and theme construction.Pinter's political views,his abomination against wars and political persecutions are forcefully and clearly demonstrated through two kinds of silences used in the two plays.On the whole,this study offers a new perspective for Pinter's political dramas study,promotes the understanding of silence as a means of communication in the real conversation and enhances the combination of literary criticism and linguistics,hoping to enrich the studies on silence in Pinter's late political dramas.