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The functions of silence
Abstract
The roles of eloquent silence in each of the six functions of language in Roman Jakobson's communicative model (1960) are considered. First, pause, being outside language, is differentiated from (eloquent) silence, a means chosen by the speaker for significant verbal communication alongside speech; it is not the listener's silence nor the silencing of the speaker. Linguistic and non-linguistic contributions to the study of eloquent silence are then briefly reviewed. Next, the roles of eloquent silence in Jakobson's model are analyzed. (Eloquent) silence, as a linguistic sign, conveys information in the referential function (zero-sign and passive constructions); it is an iconic affective way of expressing emotions (e.g., emptiness, intimacy) in the emotive function. In respect of the conative function, (eloquent) silence performs direct and indirect speech acts. Caesura, metaphors and ellipses are just a few examples of poetic silence. Silence is a means of maintaining contact and alliance in the phatic function. The various roles of silence in the metalinguistic function range from its being a discourse marker to reflecting the ‘right to silence’.
... Eades (2007, p. 285) observes that although silence "sounds" the same in any dialect it can have different meanings, functions, and interpretations. In subsequent years there has been a plethora of studies on silence and researchers such as Ephratt (2008), Cwodhury et al. (2017), and Tannen and Saville-Trioke (1985). They have indicated that silence has a communicative role in conversations This paper explores the value of silence in Rimi's casual conversations in the view of the classic English aphorism -silence is golden. ...
... Silence is the absence of phonation or a pause occurring either between turns or within turns during a conversation. Ephratt (2008) differentiated communicative silence which is a means chosen by the speaker for particular verbal communication from the silence of a listener (when it is not their turn) or silencing of the (more powerful) speaker. In conversation, people use words or the absence of words to communicate their intentions and feelings. ...
... B did not ignore this silence because he/she knew that it had contents. This study will examine this kind of silence or communicative silence in Ephratt's (2008) term in casual conversation among the native speakers of Rimi. ...
This paper provides an empirical examination of the perception of silence as a communicative act in a Rimi cultural context. Four casual conversations with Rimi native speakers were examined. Silence in conversation was determined using a turn-taking framework in Conversation Analysis previously described by Sacks et al. (1974) as a turn-taking organization. Native speakers of Rimi like people in other cultures have beliefs and myths regarding silence. However, these cultural artifacts are often hardly reflected in their real conversation practice. Rimi's belief regarding the value of silence dictates avoidance of silence because they consider it a danger and veiled bad intentions. Despite this cultural orientation regarding silence, in some contexts, Rimi native speakers give it a positive value. The findings show that silence can be used for terminating a topic, showing agreement, and indicating emotions such as sadness. Silence therefore can lead to either harmonious or troubled conversation at the same time. Many prolific studies have shown that Eastern cultures appreciate silence while the Western cultures silence is attributed to incompetence and lack of willingness to participate in communication. This cultural dichotomy regarding the perception of silence between Western and Eastern cultures gives an impression that cultures can either perceive silence positively or negatively. Data from this study show that this understanding is faulty. The data indicate that silence cannot be described categorically as solely positively or negatively perceived in a particular culture; instead, it should be viewed as a variable entity within a single cultural group.
... On the other hand, non-strategic speechlessness is primarily framed in terms of violated expectations and extreme emotions (Berger, 2004). Several other authors adopted this two-dimensional classification of speechlessness into a strategic (synonym: volitional or intentional) and a non-strategic (synonym: non-volitional or non-intentional) component (Ephratt, 2008;Kurzon, 2007Kurzon, , 2020Stringer et al., 2010). In his work on the functions and forms of silence in social interactions, Kurzon (2007) refers to Berger's classification of strategic and non-strategic speechlessness. ...
... Moreover, it can be used in the context of a conversational situation as a conscious process of the speaker's embodiment of his or her own emotion (cf. emotive functions, Ephratt, 2008). Table 1 provides a comparison of the different forms of speechlessness depending on the discipline under consideration. ...
... These parallels can be discussed primarily in terms of emotional perception and/or processing (cf. Ephratt, 2008). According to these parallels, a combined review of the literature focusing on studies of the phenomenon of speechlessness from the perspective of non-strategic and strategic non-speaking is necessary. ...
The phenomenon of speechlessness has hardly been considered in the literature from a psychological point of view. Previous research on speechlessness is limited to the fields of neurology, medicine or psychopathology. The present review aims to consider speechlessness from a psychological perspective distinct from pathology, and to highlight its observability and possible connections to existing research in the context of emotional cognition and processing. Search terms were developed and a comprehensive, systematic literature search was conducted in various databases based on previous scientific work on the understanding of non-speech, silence and speechlessness. Only results that examined the phenomenon of speechlessness from a non-pathological or non-neurological perspective were included. A total of N = 7 publications matching the inclusion criteria were identified. The results were used to develop a procedual model for the phenomenological definition of speechlessness. The developed model differentiates the observable phenomenon of speechlessness into a non-intentional, unconscious form and a intentional, conscious form. The present work suggests that meaningful emotions and their perception and processing is a core element in the emergence of speechlessness and provides a first, psychological, non-pathological explanation of speechlessness.
... Kalau seseorang tidak memiliki relasi khusus pada orang tertentu, mustahil rasa harunya muncul ketika sesuatu yang menyakitkan, menyedihkan, memilukan, terjadi pada orang yang bersangkutan. Kasih sayang memang dapat diungkapkan dengan perasaan haru (Ephratt, 2008). Seorang anak yang berhasil studi dengan gemilang, misalnya saja, pasti menimbulkan keharuan bagi orang tua yang sejak kecil merawatnya. ...
... Jadi tidak bisa dimungkiri, keharuan itu terjadi karena seseorang memiliki hubungan yang baik, hubungan yang mesra, hubungan yang sangat dekat. Jadi demikianlah pemerantian kata-kata afektif atau emotif dalam berkomunikasi (Ephratt, 2008). Bentuk emotif keharuan ternyata dapat digunakan untuk mengungkapkan rasa kasih sayang. ...
... Ratapan kasih itu bisa ditujukan kepada kekasihnya, bisa kepada orang tuanya, dan bisa pula kepada anaknya. Dalam linguistik, jelas sekali kelihatan bahwa bentuk kebahasan demikian itu merupakan kata afektif atau kata bernilai rasa (Ephratt, 2008). Kata-kata emotif itu biasanya bersifat ikonik. ...
Ekspresi terhadap objek dapat disampaikan melalui kata-kata yang memiliki daya stilistika untuk mewakili kondisi objek tersebut. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah mendeskripsikan makna pragmatik dari pemanfaatan kata-kata emotif bernuansa makna kasih sayang. Sumber data substantif penelitian ini adalah novel Anak Bajang Menggiring Angin karya Sindhunata yang diterbitkan pada tahun 2010. Data penelitian berupa tuturan tokoh yang mengandung kata-kata emotif bernuansa kasih sayang. Data dikumpulkan dengan metode simak dengan teknik baca dan teknik catat. Selanjutnya, data yang terkumpul diidentifikasi dan diklasifikasikan berdasarkan maksud kata-kata emotif pengungkap rasa kasih. Langkah berikutnya adalah triangulasi data untuk mendapatkan data yang benar-benar valid untuk dianalisis. Analisis data dilakukan dengan menggunakan metode analisis padan ekstralingual dengan mendasarkan pada konteks. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ditemukan 10 macam makna pragmatik kata-kata emotif pengungkap rasa kasih sayang. Makna pengungkap rasa kasih tersebut dinyatakan dengan: (1) janji, (2) kekecewaan, (3) kebahagiaan, (4) kesedihan, (5) perasaan haru, (6) ratapan, (7) penyesalan, (8) permohonan doa, (9) belas kasih, dan (10) nasihat.
... El fenómeno del silencio ya ha estado calificado como signo por numerosos autores (Saville-Troike, 1985;Castilla del Pino, 1992;Poyatos, 1994;Kurzon, 1998;Marco, 2001;Ephratt, 2008;Rivas, 2009;Méndez, 2013;Vainiomäki, 2004). No es una novedad entonces afirmar que el silencio es un substrato cultural generalizado, una materia expresiva, significativa y comunicativa (Torras, 2015). ...
... El silencio puede ser tanto señal como índice. Lo único que cambiaría sería su intencionalidad y por lo tanto su origen (Ephratt, 2008(Ephratt, : 1911 8 . ...
... El silencio comparte con el sonido todas sus características psicoacústicas u ontológicas (Torras, 2012: 75-81): es un elemento o un fenómeno de percepción aural, es decir por el sentido del oído; tiene una existencia -un despliegue de parámetros-lineal y se percibe también secuencialmente 9 ; y su detección y percepción depende del contraste con su mismo despliegue y con su entorno 10 . En el plano psicoacústico, el silencio es, por lo tanto, esencialmente igual que el sonido, pero 8 Michal Ephratt, por ejemplo, sin entrar mucho en este tema, diferencia el silencio en un entorno comunicativo (eloquent silence y pausa) del silencio perceptible fuera de una interacción comunicativa, el cual denomina stillness (Ephratt, 2008(Ephratt, : 1911(Ephratt, -1912. 9 Se podría decir que tanto el sonido como el silencio "solo existen en el tiempo": sin tiempo no hay ni sonido, ni silencio, ni la percepción de los mismos (Chion, 1999: 53-54;Bilmes, 1994: 73). 10 Las variaciones, el contraste, son la materia prima del silencio, pero también son indispensables para diferenciar un sonido en el continuum acústico de nuestro entorno. ...
Aunque el silencio como fenómeno es transversal y universal, la inercia de una visión lingüístico-céntrica negativa impregna el silencio de concepciones erróneas o matizables que estigmatizan su signo. Además, en un plano psicoacústico, el signo del silencio solo es previsible con dificultades en una dimensión general debido a su extradependencia del contexto, rasgo que implica que la situación y el aquí y ahora son partes indivisibles del silencio y de su significado y que crea una gran variedad de representámenes. Se propone una primera acotación analítica entre el silencio como vehículo de sonido y hablar del silencio. Seguidamente, se distingue el silencio humano y no humano y el silencio intencionado y no intencionado. Una de las singularidades del signo del silencio es su posible origen no humano y no intencionado. En esta investigación, se establece un primer marco aproximativo para, en un futuro, analizar los componentes del signo del silencio.
... These contexts were further interpreted by Jakobson and Leech (Schmidt, 2000;Gretsch, 2009). There are some aspects to be taken into account in the discussion of situational contexts, namely, speaker-hearer aspect, utterance as a verbal act, utterance as a product of a verbal act, and the contexts of the utterance (Zegarac, 1998;Ephratt, 2008). The triadicity of the pragmatic meaning of culture-specific phatic functions in the Indonesian language will be examined by considering the previously-discussed contexts. ...
... On the contrary, a grateful person always feels blessed and happy in his/her life because the blessing is always abundant. In the Javanese community, the word "nggrangsang" refers to the scarcity mentality, which believes that one is always lacking something in life (Ephratt, 2008). People with a scarcity mindset will fail to give thanks because they think that there is nothing for them to be thankful for. ...
... To conclude, this study found the form of triadicity of the pragmatic meaning in fifteen phatic functions. They are (1) small talk, (2) courtesy, (3) disappointing, (4) thanking, (5) joking, (6) complimenting, (7) apologizing, (8) avoiding, (9) disagreeing, (10) negating, (11) greeting, (12) offering, (13) emphasizing, and (14) reminding. The study is limited by the types of the investigated domains. ...
This study aims to describe the triadicities meaning of Indonesian phatic functions using a culture-specific pragmatic perspective. The data prepared for this study is the triadic meaning of Indonesian phatic functions in a specific culture, i.e., the Javanese. The data were collected and presented using the observation method and involved both conversation and uninvolved conversation techniques. Data analysis was carried out using the identity method. It involved the process of comparing and contrasting data with their external contexts. There were fifteen types of triadic of the pragmatic meaning in Indonesian phatic functions: (1) small talk, (2) courtesy, (3) disappointment, (4) thanking, (5) joking, (6) complimenting, (7) apologizing, (8) avoiding, (9) disagreeing, (10) negating, (11) greeting, (12) offering, (13) emphasizing, and (14) reminding. These triadicities illustrate that Indonesian culture, especially Java, has several phatic functions in pragmatic meaning that give some color to the regional language.
... Silence has been a fruitful area of study for philosophers and linguists. Cicero regarded silence as "one of the great arts of conversation" (Ephratt 2008). Wittgenstein advises "Whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must be silent" (Pattie 2000: 120). ...
... Indeed, dictionaries define silence by absence, by what it does not contain, by what it is not -"The state or condition where nothing is audible; absence of all sound or noise, complete quietness or stillness; noiselessness". 2 Ephratt quotes Sobkowiak's not uncommon belief that "Silence is inferior to speech since it does not function referentially and metalinguistically" (Ephratt 2008(Ephratt : 1926. Steiner disagrees, pointing to the usefulness of silence "language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. ...
... The rest, and presumably it is the much larger part, is silence" (Steiner 2010: 30). Both Beckett and Pinter have raised silence to a level of important eloquence in their work so that "there is meaningless speech and meaningful silence" (Ephratt 2008(Ephratt : 1918. Thought is a brooding, silent activity and it is when Beckett and Pinter's characters plunge into thought that they fall silent, hiding what is going on in their minds. ...
... La investigación pragmática del silencio, desde entonces, se ha ampliado, por ejemplo, con los trabajos de Ephratt (2008), quien se refiere al silencio como una elección y un acto de habla elocuente; Wharton (2009), que propone que los silencios son comportamientos muy conscientes en algunos momentos, es decir, que se muestran de forma deliberada; y Schroeter (2013), quien les achaca una posible evaluación e interpretación compleja o imprecisa deliberada si el emisor así lo desea. ...
... La necesidad de analizar el silencio desde un enfoque experimental y empírico que se aleje de la perspectiva impresionista ha sido oportunamente destacada por diversos investigadores (Jaworski 1993;Kurzon 1997;Mateu 2001;Cestero 2006;Ephratt 2008;Camargo y Méndez 2013;Méndez 2014aMéndez , 2016Méndez , 2023aMéndez , 2023b. Los estudios más recientes han intentado, además, explicar el silencio desde una perspectiva dinámica. ...
El silencio es un elemento discursivo poco tratado en la investigación pragmática. Aunque nadie duda de su valor comunicativo, sus funciones están todavía por determinar en muchos contextos. Existen razones tipológicas, metodológicas y socioculturales que explican la escasa atención recibida por estos signos en la oralidad (Méndez y Camargo, 2015a). Para comprender mejor estas razones, es necesario hacer un recorrido por los estudios lingüísticos desde los años 50 del pasado siglo XX, donde empieza a tratarse el fenómeno, hasta nuestros días. Este trabajo tiene como primer objetivo presentar la evolución que ha tenido el estudio del silencio en la lingüística en las últimas décadas. Para hacerlo, se parte de la postura interdisciplinar adoptada en los primeros estudios hasta llegar a las investigaciones pragmáticas más recientes y a los estudios de corpus y multimodales de la actualidad. El segundo objetivo es conocer el punto en que se encuentran los estudios hoy y trazar las posibles líneas de investigación del mañana.
... Abordar a linguagem como ponto de partida para tratar das questões de diversidade e inclusão exige a compreensão das representações da linguagem e da análise de discurso relacionadas aos fenômenos de discursividade e poder. Para isso, recorreremos à gramática (Lopes, 1999; M. C. P. S. Silva & Koch, 1994), à análise de discurso (Ephratt, 2008;Kurzon, 1998;Orlandi, 2011) e, novamente, ao construto de racismo estrutural (Almeida, 2019;Ribeiro, 2019b). ...
... Nessa linha, Gurevitch (1989) definiu três formas de silêncio em uma conversa, ao escrever seu artigo seminal "Distance and conversation": o silêncio ritualístico de um diálogo -as idas e vindas de uma conversa entre interlocutores -; uma interrupção involuntária na comunicação que deixa a conversa "cair" em silêncio; e o silêncio voluntário de um indivíduo para dar atenção a seu interlocutor, levando o sujeito a se colocar na posição de "outro". As práticas discursivas de silêncio intencional foram denominadas "silêncio eloquente" por Ephratt (2008). Este autor define como "silêncio eloquente" os silêncios intencionais, aqueles exercidos voluntariamente por um enunciador como mecanismo de defesa em relação a um ponto ou mesmo por não ter interesse no assunto. ...
Resumo O presente ensaio tem como objetivo interpretar os processos de silêncio, silenciamento e silêncio cúmplice como fatores que contribuem para a perpetuação do racismo, das desigualdades e exclusões que ocorrem nas organizações. Por meio de referenciais teóricos sobre silêncio, silenciamento e silêncio cúmplice, pretende-se apresentar uma forma complementar de se demonstrar como os ecos de processos históricos de racismo contra pessoas negras podem ainda ser responsáveis pela estruturação de práticas nas organizações. Adicionalmente, busca-se indicar como os estudos sobre silêncio, silenciamento e silêncio cúmplice podem oferecer alternativas de práxis para administradores e acadêmicos de estudos organizacionais, visando à mudança de práticas estruturais, de modo a quebrar o ciclo de racismo estrutural nas organizações.
... Approaching language as a starting point for addressing issues of diversity and inclusion requires understanding language representations and the discourse analysis connected to the phenomena of discursiveness and power. To do so we will resort to grammar (Lopes, 1999; M. C. P. S. Silva & Koch, 1994), discourse analysis (Ephratt, 2008;Kurzon, 1998;Orlandi, 2011) and, again, to the construct of structural racism (Almeida, 2019;Ribeiro, 2019b). ...
... Gurevitch (1989) defined three forms of silence in a conversation when writing his seminal article "Distance and conversation": the ritualistic silence of dialogue -interlocutors taking turns in a conversation; involuntary interruption in communication that allows the conversation to "fall" into silence; and the voluntary silence of an individual when paying attention to their interlocutor, leading the subject to adopt the position of the "other." The discursive practices of intentional silence were called "eloquent silence" by Ephratt (2008), which he defines as intentional silences, those voluntarily exercised by an enunciator as a defense mechanism in opposition to a point, or because they have no interest in the subject. This is the opposite of "silencing", which is silence imposed by an external entity as a form of deprivation of the right to expression. ...
This essay aims to interpret the processes of silence, silencing, and complicit silence as factors that contribute to the perpetuation of racism, inequalities, and exclusions that occur in organizations. From the presentation of theoretical references on silence, silencing, and complicit silence, the essay presents a complementary way of demonstrating how the echoes of historical processes of racism against Black people can still be responsible for structuring practices in organizations. Additionally, we demonstrate how studies on silence, silencing, and complicit silence can offer praxis alternatives for administrators and academics of organizational studies to change structural practices to break the cycle of structural racism in organizations.
... Interpreted as silence. Ephratt (2008) [95] The outcome of taking the inverse Fourier transform (IFT) of the logarithm of the estimated signal spectrum that informs the rate of change in the different spectrum bands. A smoothing process is applied to the cepstral coefficients prior to calculating the peak prominence. ...
... Interpreted as silence. Ephratt (2008) [95] The outcome of taking the inverse Fourier transform (IFT) of the logarithm of the estimated signal spectrum that informs the rate of change in the different spectrum bands. A smoothing process is applied to the cepstral coefficients prior to calculating the peak prominence. ...
Introduction: Parkinson’s disease (PD) commonly causes speech impairments, including difficulties in expressing emotions through voice. Method: The objective of this study was to investigate gendered vocal expressions of fear, anger, sadness, and happiness for mild to moderate PD. Prosodic features (related to fundamental frequency (F0), intensity (I), speech rate, articulation rate, and number and duration of pauses) and acoustic correlates of voice quality (CPPS, jitter, shimmer, and HNR) were collected from 14 patients with PD (mean age = 69.93; SD = 7.12; 8 males, 6 females) and 13 healthy controls (HC) (mean age = 68.13; SD = 8.27; 5 males, 8 females) matched for age, sex, and years of education. The utterances were extracted from four emotional and one neutral text. The neutral utterance and the emotional utterances were compared. Intra-sex comparison (female with PD vs. female HC and male with PD vs. male HC) and inter-sex comparison (female vs. male both for patients with PD and for HC), were performed with the Mann–Whitney test. A Mann–Whitney test was also used to compare the different emotional conditions, considering sex and PD diagnosis as well. Results: No significant intra-sex differences were found for the neutral speech, but inter-sex differences emerged. Regarding emotional speech, females with PD featured lower MaxF0 than female HCs for happiness and higher intensity variability (SD I) for sadness. Utterances by females with PD had lower CPPS than utterances by HCs for anger and fear. Utterances by males with PD had lower minimum intensity (MinI) than utterances by male HCs when expressing fear. Conclusions: Emotional vocal expression in individuals with PD was found to be impaired and showed sex differences. These findings have the potential to significantly impact the quality of life of PD patients.
... In the context of the VR-enhanced science unit and influenced by my own researcher positionality (Holmes, 2020), I selected the following nine modes for coding students and teacher's talk: (1) spoken language, prosody, and sounds, (2) written language, (3) body and locomotive movement, (4) gesture, (5) gaze & head movement (6) facial expression, (7) visual representation, (8) spatial arrangement and distance, and (9) silence (Ephratt, 2008;Mills et al., 2022;Qin & Wang, 2021). Gesture is a separate mode from bodily or locomotive movement as it often conveys specific iconic, metaphoric, deictic and beat meanings (McNeill, 1992;Qin & Wang, 2021). ...
... Gesture is a separate mode from bodily or locomotive movement as it often conveys specific iconic, metaphoric, deictic and beat meanings (McNeill, 1992;Qin & Wang, 2021). Silence was considered a possibly intentional discursive move in this context as it could lead to critical insights (Ephratt, 2008). In this study, silence was coded when a speaker initiated a conversation (e.g. ...
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Multilingual learners (MLs) often struggle with science conceptual learning partly due to the abstractness of the concepts and the complexity of scientific texts. This study presents a case of a Virtual Reality (VR) enhanced science learning unit to support middle-school students’ science conceptual learning. Using a transformative mixed methods design, this study examines ML’s science learning and participation in VR educational programing from the multimodal perspective. Combining the strengths of quantitative and qualitative data analysis, the results of this study show that engaging in multimodal meaning-making in multiple ways, including the VR game, can enable multilingual learners to gain conceptual understanding of science content equally as well as their English-speaking counterparts. Based on the findings, a framework for multimodal instructional design to support MLs is also discussed. Overall, this study contributes to the growing body of research on the uses of VR-enhanced multimodal learning in K-12 science education, especially for multilingual learners.
... Sobkowiak (1997: 44) defines conversational silence as "that which is deliberately produced for communicative purposes in what is perceived by both parties as a communicative situation." Likewise, Ephratt (2008Ephratt ( : 1913 states that conversational silence is a tool chosen by S to communicate his or her message. Scholars use different, perhaps interchangeable, terms for this type of silence: communicative silence (Bruneau, 1973), strategic silence (Brummett, 1980), propositional-verbal silence (Saville-Troike, 1985), conversational silence (Blimes, 1994), intentional silence (Kurzon, 1998), interactive silence (Poyatos, 2002), and eloquent silence (Ephratt, 2008). ...
... Likewise, Ephratt (2008Ephratt ( : 1913 states that conversational silence is a tool chosen by S to communicate his or her message. Scholars use different, perhaps interchangeable, terms for this type of silence: communicative silence (Bruneau, 1973), strategic silence (Brummett, 1980), propositional-verbal silence (Saville-Troike, 1985), conversational silence (Blimes, 1994), intentional silence (Kurzon, 1998), interactive silence (Poyatos, 2002), and eloquent silence (Ephratt, 2008). Brummett (1980: 289) states that not all of silences are conversational. ...
... Furthermore, the lower intonation from HCP1 suggests the lack of knowledge of whether the patient is impulsive, and this resonates with Berger [30] on uncertain speech. HCP4 paused a few times before stating that the patient is probably violent, and this resonates with Ephratt [31] in demonstrating careful decision-making before conversing. In this way, HCP4 carefully constructed their statements before making an explicit point that this patient is violent. ...
... Additionally, silence is portrayed in extract one when HCP1 delivered their message on gender bias with the use of gestures (L5 and L11), and this echoes the work by Al Jahdhami [32] in the use of non-verbal communication to elicit meaning. Similar to extract four, in extract one, HCP1 paused a few times before elaborating on gender bias (L13 and 14), and this indicates thoughtful conversation [31]. Silence is also exhibited in extract two, where HCP2 validated the domestic abuse that occurred within a patient's family (L12), and after 6 seconds, this is confirmed through acknowledgement of HCP1 (L13). ...
Previous research suggests that gender bias is pervasive in health care and has deleterious effects on treatment outcomes for patients. When developing and improving training on gender bias, we need to further our understanding of how such topics arise and are sustained in conversations between healthcare professionals (HCPs). The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of patient gender in HCP decision-making by analyzing how they surface, discuss and manage topics around gender.
An ethnomethodological qualitative study using discursive psychology and conversation analysis was implemented to examine 10 simulation debriefs in a specialized mental healthcare simulation centre in London. Video footage was obtained from mental health simulation training courses on bias in clinical decision-making, involving HCPs from mixed healthcare professions. Following transcription of selected segments, the debriefs were analyzed and repeated patterns of interaction were captured in distinct themes.
Four main themes were identified from the data, indicating some of the ways in which conversations about gender are managed: collaboration (to encourage discussion), surprise (when unexpected topics arose), laughter (to diffuse tense situations) and silence (demonstrating careful thinking). Patients with mental health conditions were perceived differently in terms of treatment decisions due to existing gender biases.
The persistence of gender bias that may result in discrimination in health care with negative consequences attests to the need for greater awareness and training development at various levels to include an intersectional approach.
... In the bid to query Akobi why she is manhandled this way, she is told to shut up. This resonates with the silencing ideology put forth by Ephratt (2008) who argued that the act of silencing, is the speaker's choice of "exercising power over another… it is an act depriving a person of expression" (1913). Therefore, we contend that since Mara was deprived expression, when obviously she tried to as shown in the extract, Akobi silenced her. ...
... They had no authority to challenge Okonkwo because their culture has ascribed them with weakness. The patriarchal society has therefore, deprived the women expression (Ephratt, 2008), or the voice to speak out or stand against some of these acts of molestation. ...
This paper explored how women are silenced in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. It drew on Parpart’s (Rethinking silence, gender and power in insecure sites: Implications for feminist security studies in a postcolonial world. Review of International Studies, 46(3), 315–324 . https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021051900041X ) insight that a person who is silenced, who cannot say what is on their mind or speak out against injustice, can quite rightly be seen as lacking agency. Our critical reception of the works of Darko and Achebe revealed that women, or the female characters have been built, programmed and oriented with weakness, zero authority and playing second fiddle to their male counterparts. We argued that the nature of the silencing of the women: (1) depicted the various instances of women’s subjugation, subordination, submission, and compliance, amongst other things, in male dominated traditional societies, (2) encapsulated the hegemonic issues in the patriarchal society feminist scholars vehemently write against, and (3) demonstrated that silence is a marker for empty speech, the unsaid, or keeping something to the self. The paper is a contribution to further studies on gender roles and the discourse on gendered power imbalances.
... We examined the lecturer's eloquent silence and students' stillness. Eloquent silence (Ephratt, 2008) refers to the silence chosen by the lecturer for effective verbal communication. Students' stillness, on the contrary, points out a feature of the students' behaviour in the context of the study: they were quiet, "in silence", or writing in the chat (Querol-Julián, 2021b). ...
Two major trends outline the university of the twenty-first century, innovative online instructional technologies and English-Medium Instruction (EMI). As regards the former, new technology-driven lecture formats have emerged, such as live online lectures. These lectures are characterised by the permanent spatial separation of learners and teacher, and real time instruction, which allows for immediate two-way communication through text-, audio-, and/or video-based systems (Martin, Ahlgrim-Delzell, & Budhrani, 2017). The second trend refers to the internationalisation of the university, as EMI is considered to be playing a key role in this process. Although EMI in non-English dominant contexts has spread worldwide, literature on EMI classroom discourse is still at an infant stage (Macaro, Curle, Pun, An, & Dearden, 2018) compared to, for example, the copious amount of research on teachers’ and learners’ perceptions and/or attitudes towards EMI (Aguilar & Rodríguez, 2012). Therefore, studies reflecting the dynamics of classroom discourse where English is used as a lingua franca (Björkman, 2013; Mauranen, 2012) are needed to disclose good practices for effective teaching in EMI programmes. Learner interaction with faculty and peers is central in any educational context, the more the learners are engaged in the construction and development of their learning, the more they learn (Carini, Kuh, & Klein, 2006). Hence, teachers have the responsibility to promote engagement through interaction in class; however, classroom interaction can be a challenge in this “new” lecturing format, due to the constraints of the virtual context where the communicative act takes place. Videoconferencing technology systems are employed in live online lectures; nonetheless, in general, teacher and learners communicate through different channels during the lectures: visual-oral mainly for teachers (who are in front of the camera) and written for learners (through a chat). In this communicative situation the lack of eye contact can hinder interaction. Additionally, silence is seen as a component of interaction (Poyatos, 2002) and thus as part of communication, and it can be deafening in live online lectures when learners do not respond to the teacher’s initiation move of an interaction exchange. The present study aims at exploring the influence in interaction of teaching through English as a lingua franca in an EMI virtual context. We were particularly concerned about how teacher’s silence was integrated and how learners’ stillness was managed during the interaction. With this purpose, we conducted a contrastive study of the episodes of interactions that took place in two live online lectures given by the same teacher, one in Spanish (L1) and the other in English, in two parallel online international master’s programmes. We focused on teacher’s eloquent silence (Ephratt, 2008), that is, the silence chosen by the teacher for significant verbal communication, and on learners’ stillness, which refers to learners’ absence of “talk”. We adopted a multimodal discourse analysis perspective to identify the different actions that took place during teacher’s silence and how these were expressed through multimodal ensembles of embodied and disembodied semiotic resources, as well as how the teacher promoted learners’ participation to avoid stillness. As the analysis revealed, some differences were observed in the two lectures, mainly as regards how engagement was fostered and how learning was scaffolded in the EMI lecture through the chat.
... Para lograr recuperar el pensamiento del hablante expresado a través de un silencio, el destinatario deberá desempeñar un papel activo que le permita reconocer tanto el material extralingüístico del discurso como todos los signos verbales y no verbales que lo acompañen (Escandell Vidal, 2006;Méndez, 2016a). Méndez (2016a) plantea que, si tomamos en cuenta al silencio como un signo de carácter pragmático, podemos distinguir principalmente dos tipos: (a) aquellos que significan por sí mismos o, dicho de otro modo, que constituyen un acto de habla como tal al presentarse como alternativa frente a otra opción lingüística (Escandell Vidal, 2006;Méndez, 2016a;Poyatos, 2018), a los que Ephratt (2008) llamó silencios elocuentes, y (b) los silencios que poseen un valor de signos. La autora propone que estos últimos aparecerán en la interacción como marcadores discursivos, estructurales, psicológicos y/o normativos. ...
En este artículo se estudian las funciones pragmalingüísticas del silencio como signo pragmático en narraciones conversacionales de experiencia personal producidas por hablantes de Santiago de Chile. A partir del análisis de 27 narraciones videograbadas, se identifican los rasgos lingüísticos, no verbales y situacionales que definen el significado del silencio y se propone una taxonomía de funciones basada en la teoría de los prototipos. Los principales hallazgos dan cuenta de que existen al menos 10 tipos de silencios —unos más prototípicos que otros— definidos por las funciones pragmáticas que desempeñan en el género narración conversacional. Dichos tipos se pueden ordenar en cuatro categorías: silencios estructuradores de la conversación, silencios estructuradores de la narración, silencios discursivos y silencios cognitivos. Son los silencios estructuradores de la narración los que operan como prototipo del género en estudio.
... Due to the difficulty involved in its systematization, interpretation, and vast intercultural variability, the notion of silence as absence, as the opposite of eloquence, has been emphasized from different perspectives, often comparing it with the power of logos and associating it with scarcely communicative and even impolite or negative meanings. In this paper, we consider silence not as an omission, but as an action, as a nonverbal sign of a pragmatic character that is consubstantial to conversation and belongs to the paralinguistic system, whose meaning is neither assumed nor taken for granted, but interpreted in the broader context of interaction (Jaworski 1993(Jaworski , 2018Poyatos 1994Poyatos , 2002Kurzon 1997Kurzon , 2018Ephratt 2008Ephratt , 2022Cestero-Mancera 2000Camargo-Fernández and Méndez-Guerrero 2014a;Méndez-Guerrero 2014, 2024. Specifically, following Cestero-Mancera's (2014, p. 142) proposal, we include silence in the group of paralinguistic regulators, along with pauses, and define it as an absence of speech equal to or longer than 1 s that appears in interaction and is used to communicate (Knapp 1980;Poyatos 1994;Cestero-Mancera 1999;Camargo-Fernández and Méndez-Guerrero 2013a;Méndez-Guerrero and Camargo-Fernández 2015;Méndez-Guerrero 2023). ...
Human communication is a multimodal phenomenon that involves the combined use of verbal and non-verbal signs. It is estimated that non-verbal signs, especially paralinguistic and kinesic ones, have a significant impact on message production. Silence in Spanish has been described as a plurifunctional communicative resource whose meanings vary depending on contextual, social, and cultural factors. The pragmatic and sociolinguistic nature of this phenomenon calls for examining each case considering the context, the social variables, and the relationship between participants. The aim of this study is to determine the use of silence in Spanish by young women. To achieve this, a corpus of 9 h of spontaneous conversations among six young Spanish university women (1.5 h per participant) was analyzed. The analysis has allowed identifying, first, a series of communicative functions of silence produced by the participants. A relationship between the duration of silence and its communicative function has also been established. Finally, differences in the use of silence by the participants have been found, determined by the interlocutor (male/female), which confirms that women use silence as a basic interactive strategy differently when talking with women and when they do so with men.
... Altogether, this section of the literature helps us to understand how people engage with accounting even when it is realized and passed silently. Silence, however, is multidimensional (Dupret 2019;Corbin 2016;Ephratt 2008). It goes beyond nonverbal practices. ...
This paper studies accounting and silence. Building on studies of accounting talk and introducing theories of “silencing,” we highlight the role of accounting silences in the production of engaging organizational conversations. Through a qualitative case study, we identify three forms of silence: the unspeakable, the unsaid, and the inaudible, and their links to accounting. Silences create motivations to engage in further accounting talk, but they also deny certain groups a voice in those conversations. An impression of participation, openness, and transparency emerges despite unequal access and the silencing of certain groups. Accounting itself can be silenced to avoid uncomfortable topics, potential problems, and anxiety‐inducing uncertainties. This silencing may serve to preserve a useful ignorance, avoid being in the know, and build alluring narratives and engaging conversations. Accounting silences sustain such conversations by protecting them from alternative voices, unsettling knowledge, and narratives that are incompatible with the organization's preferred story.
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... Explicite, parfois dénué de sens et non-communicatif versus implicite, stratégique, communicatif, indirect (Dimitrov, 2019), « éloquent » (Ephratt, 2008), le plus souvent plus expressif que la parole (al Jahdhami, 2018), « le silence fait partie du langage » (Blanchot, 1949 : 67). Se taire, c'est une manière de s'exprimer, puisque « [s]e taire n'est pas toujours le meilleur moyen de se taire. ...
'Le Souffleur de la peur' is the first play written, in the ’70s, by Matéi Visniec (n. 1956).
Though short, the work confronts attempts at interpretation with both contextual and discursive ambiguity: a
character generically called Monsieur Bruno simulates a dialogue with a Man who remains perfectly silent throughout
the whole loquacious, distressing, and catastrophic monologue. M.B. is equally afraid and frightening. His discourse
targets everybody and nobody at the same time. The following approach constitutes itself as a commentary rooted in this
postmodernist piece of contemporary theater, revolving around two central concepts, ambiguity and silence, both
indissolubly linked with a crushing totalitarian sociopolitical background driven by fear.
... The idea that silence can be equated with client aggression has been a particularly salient feature of psychoanalysis. In 1961, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a special issue on silence as a form of acting out (cited in Ephratt, 2008). Gale and Sanchez (2005) challenge these traditional views of silence, operating from within a psychoanalytic framework, and arguing that taking silence out of the realm of language leads to mistakes in interpretation and denies clients "quiet areas" within the therapeutic community (cf. ...
Most literature concerning silence in psychotherapy has focused on the meaning of silences, particularly from psychoanalytic perspectives, and is based on clinical experience rather than empirical studies. These authors tend to interpret silence as pathology or resistance in the client and/or advise clinicians to be especially tolerant of silence and to avoid filling silences. Although some studies have found that moderate silence is correlated with better outcomes, these studies ignore psychosocial aspects of the interaction. No research has looked at silence in psychotherapy as a linguistic device to manage the local sequential environment. Silence following an initiating action is characteristic of dispreferred responses such as refusals and negatively valenced answers in general conversation. In this study, we used conversation analysis to explore preference and the role of silence in nine spiritually oriented humanistic psychotherapy sessions. We found that in contrast to everyday conversation, in these interactions, there is a preference for gaps and pauses while immediate responses are dispreferred.
... Sobre el silencio, la pragmalingüística ha venido desarrollando propuestas desde hace varias décadas. Resultaron pertinentes para nuestra búsqueda los trabajos de Ephratt (2008), Mateu (2001) y Poyatos (1994a), quienes presentan sendos recorridos acerca de las múltiples posibilidades de interpretación de esta estrategia tan ambigua. ...
En este artículo se presentan algunos aspectos del análisis pragmalingüístico de Diatriba de amor contra un hombre sentado de Gabriel García Márquez. Primero, se desarrollan las consideraciones teóricas y metodológicas referidas al tratamiento de la obra dramática como corpus válido para este tipo de investigaciones. Después, se presenta el análisis pragmalingüístico de las didascalias, a partir de la revisión de la clasificación propuesta por Hermenegildo (1986). Las implicaciones de este tipo de investigaciones son brevemente comentadas.
... What is meant is different from what is said. Presupposition, implicature, sarcasm, irony and innuendo are tactics of implicit silence (Ephratt, 2008). ...
... Sessizliğe ilişkin bu olumsuz çağrışımlar, sessizliğe yönelik akademik tartışmalarla koşut ilerlemektedir. 1970'lerde sessizlik kavramını, "olumsuzluk, pasiflik, iktidarsızlık ve ölüm" ile ilişkilendiren dilbilimciler; 1980'lerin ortalarında, Cicero'nun sessizliği "en büyük konuşma sanatlarından biri" olarak kabul etmesinden hareketle ortaya atılan "dilbaz sessizlik" (eloquent silence) ile ilgilenmeye başlamıştır (Ephratt, 2008(Ephratt, , ss. 1909(Ephratt, -1910. "Dilbaz sessizlik", sessizliğin bir anlamı hatta birçok anlamı olduğuna vurgu yapan bir kavramdır. ...
Bir halkla ilişkiler stratejisi olarak sessizlik, halkla ilişkilerin görmezden geldiği konuların başında gelmektedir. Kriz iletişiminde kurumların ve markaların sessizlik stratejilerinden ziyade ne söylediklerine odaklanması, bu suskunluğun en açık örneği konumundadır. Ne var ki, mükemmel halkla ilişkilerin şeffaflık ve dürüstlük gibi normatif değerlerinin karşıtı olarak konumlandıran sessizlik, halkla ilişkiler pratiğinin temelinde yer almaktadır. Kamuların beklentileri olduğu halde sessizliğin kasıtlı ve bilinçli olarak tercih edilmesi anlamına gelen “stratejik sessizlik” kavramı; toplumsal, çevresel ve politik sorunların yaşandığı toplumsal infial dönemlerinde daha kritik hale gelmektedir. Afet dönemlerinde sessiz kalan markalara yönelik kamuoyu baskısı, markaların ve kurumların sessizliklerini bozmalarına yol açmaktadır. Çalışma, 6 Şubat 2023’te meydana gelen depremin ilk üç günü sessiz kalan dokuz markanın, kamuoyu tepkilerinin ardından sessizliklerini nasıl açıkladıklarını ve sessizliklerini ne şekilde çerçevelediklerini araştırmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda, çalışmada söz konusu dokuz markanın Twitter’da 9 Şubat 2023 tarihinde yaptıkları kamuoyu açıklamaları bir halkla ilişkiler faaliyeti olarak ele alınmış ve açıklamaların tematik analizi gerçekleştirilmiştir. Tematik analizde, sessizliğin işlevleri olarak tanımlanan “bağlantı”, “etkileme”, “ifşa”, “yargılama” ve “harekete geçme” işlevleri analiz kategorileri olarak kullanılmıştır. Analiz sonucunda; sessizliklerini duyarsızlık ve duygusuzluk ile ilişkilendiren kamu kategorilerinin tepkilerine karşılık, markaların sessizliklerini etik değerlerle ilişkilendirdikleri yani sessizliklerini “törensel sessizlik” olarak işaretledikleri ortaya konmuştur.
... (Entrevista a Lenore, alrededor de 25 años, mayo de 2017) Como analiza Lenore, los roles tradicionales asociados a la masculinidad implican una simplificación de las respuestas cognitivas permitidas y/o aceptables para varones en este contexto. Aquí hemos de subrayar hasta qué punto se dibuja un panorama en el que callarse desborda el concepto mismo de silencio y sus funciones (Ephratt 2008), debiéndose así atender a diferentes matices si se pretende dar cuenta de este de una manera más precisa. No en vano, en la taciturnidad de los varones aquí considerada, el silencio se declina en una pluralidad de formas de la reticencia (tales como omisión, mutismo, etc.), que se hacen presentes en situaciones bien distintas. ...
El presente artículo aborda las narrativas de transformación manejadas por líderes de comunidades religiosas que participan en talleres para la prevención de violencia sexual y de género (VSG) llevados a cabo en distintas localidades africanas por una ONG con sede en Sudáfrica. En concreto, buscamos revelar las formas en que quienes participan en dichos talleres dan sentido a la transformación de género en territorios religiosos y seculares; así como, en relación con eso, explorar las tensiones y conformidades que emergen cuando tanto mujeres como varones analizan las desigualdades de género en sus entornos personales. El artículo muestra cómo tales participantes manejan la noción de transformación en el ámbito de la violencia de género, a tenor de un repertorio emocional enmarcado por expresiones en términos de hablar, escuchar, callar y silencio. Este proceso tiene al menos dos dimensiones: por una parte, articula los desafíos que enfrentan al tratar con VSG en sus vidas personales desde espacios concretos como la iglesia, la familia o en las relaciones afectivas y el entorno comunitario; por otra parte, ayuda a enmarcar las tensiones existentes entre nuevas perspectivas en torno a los roles y relaciones de género que se desdoblan en territorios seculares y religiosos.
... Il processo che si annoda all'applicazione di questo termine, pertanto, avrebbe una configurazione antitetica, ovvero di contrapposizione tra stasi e dinamismo, tra solitudine e legame. "Silenzio" è infatti condizione per la quale la parola non può essere espressa, rappresenta l'intervallo temporale, lo spazio riflessivo necessario prima di esprimersi, prima di operare con il linguaggio al fine di comunicare, trasmettere opinioni (Ephratt, 2008). Silenzio è anche riferito a ciò che è inesprimibile, a ciò che è indecifrabile e necessita pertanto di un'assenza di suono al fine carpirne il senso e il significato più profondo (Galimberti, 2018(Galimberti, , p. 1178. ...
The aim of this contribution is to share an initial reflection on the
inclusive and reflective potential of silence in the context of educational
processes. Today's society is often characterised by a constant search for the
spoken word, for sound, leaving little space for reflection, which can also
take place through the exercise of silence. The contribution starts with a general overview of the polysemy of the concept of silence, according to
various perspectives of interpretation; subsequently, the focus is shifted to
the importance that silence can assume from an educational perspective. The
contribution concludes with a reflection on the pedagogical potential of
silence to foster inclusive processes, based on the recognition of the self and
the other, both from the perspective of the student and of the educator.
... When it comes to emotional aspects, silence can be the cause, consequence, and means of expressing and managing various emotions (Ephratt, 2008). As highlighted by Johannesen (1974), the same silent episode in a quiet space or interaction might lead to opposite feelings, depending on individual and contextual backgrounds. ...
Despite the pervasiveness and ambivalence of silence in consumption experiences, consumer research on silence is still scarce and draws mostly on a static and organizational perspective of the consumer experience. Drawing on the review of existing perspectives in the multidisciplinary literature, the contribution of this article is threefold: first it extends current knowledge by offering a comprehensive definition of silence and building a typology of silence experiences. Second, this article develops a framework identifying the functions of silence and highlighting the potential factors affecting its effects. Finally, this article proposes an agenda to stimulate future research on silence in view of the consumer experience.
... It has realized and explored various types and functions of silence in the therapeutic discourse. For example, this discipline regards silence as a way of not only acting-out but also communication (Ephratt, 2008(Ephratt, , p. 1933. For instance, Theodor Reik (1888Reik ( -1970, an Austrian psychoanalyst, wrote: "There is meaningless speech and meaningful silence" (1968, p.183). ...
One of the conspicuous features of the twentieth-century West was silence. This idea could be supported by examining reflections of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fritz Mauthner, John Cage, Samuel Beckett, Ihab Hassan, Franz Kafka, Wassily Kandinsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Wolfgang Iser, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Macherey. To me, silence is not a mere theory, but rather a phenomenon from which we can get practical benefits. I believe silence is an eye, eye of knowledge. We can broaden our knowledge of the world through silence. To convey the idea that silence is an eye, I have concocted the word slence, where has replaced the letter i and stands for the eye. This means knowledge can enable us to see, thereby acquiring knowledge of, what used to be invisible, and accordingly unknowable. In other words, through silence, we can achieve a certain type of literacy. I substantiate this claim by exploring the Horus myth, Ojo de Dios, John Cage’s 4' 33", the nature of Expressionist paintings, Hinduism, thoughts of Hermes Trismegistus and Ibn al-Arabi, and practices of Mohammad, the prophet of Islam.
... The use of silence, the antithesis of over-lexicalisation, has been investigated as a tool (Ephratt, 2008(Ephratt, , 2012Nikolić, 2016) within both conflict management and psychotherapy. Chowdhury et al. (2017) suggested that silence can indicate hesitation or indecisiveness of the speaker and may be used to force another speaker to respond. ...
Ashworth Hospital provides care for inpatients detained under the Mental Health Acts who present a danger to themselves or others. Rehabilitative interventions can help support the best outcomes for patients, their families, care providers, and society. The efficacy of weekly Shared Reading sessions for four patients with experience of psychosis and a history of self-harm was investigated using a 12-month longitudinal case series design. Session data were subjected to psychological discourse analysis to identify discursive strategies employed to accomplish social action and change over the duration of the intervention. Archetypes of interactional achievement across sessions emerged. Broadening of capacity to consider was demonstrated through increased hedging and less declarative language. Increased assertiveness was achieved through reduced generalisation marked by a transition from second-person plural pronouns to more first-person singular pronouns. Avoidance of expression and disagreement strategies diminished over time. In addition, heightened engagement was accomplished through the increased tendency to employ functionally related and preferred responses within adjacency pairs, which mirrored non-verbal communicative strategies. Shared Reading shows promise for promoting the interactional accomplishment for individuals within high secure settings, who are ready to undertake a recovery-related activity. Pathways of interaction should continue to be explored, with consideration to the current study’s strengths and limitations. This study contributes to the understanding of efficacious reading study design and the interactional outcomes of therapeutic reading.
... In certain communicative situations, silence can substitute speech and express even more than words. To underline its significance in verbal communication, we adopt the term of Michal Ephratt [2008] -eloquent silence. ...
The paper deals with the importance of speech (and absence of speech) for the storytelling strategies in film, which includes verbal and non-verbal interaction between characters, as well as speech in a broader sense as part of cinematic soundscape with particular focus on the relationship between sound and image. For the analysis, Laila Pakalniņa’s “The Shoe” (Kurpe, 1998) and Dāvis Sīmanis’ “Exiled” (Pelnu sanatorija, 2016) where chosen. Although “The Shoe” and “Exiled” differ considerably in terms of visual aesthetics and thematic scope, both films share stylistic features of slow cinema. The significance of silence and speech in shaping film narrative (syntagms) is analyzed using narratology models; the interaction between speech and silence, as well as between sound and image is described using linguistic terms.
... Other significance of meditation related to the believing Scholars have increasingly become interested in silence and its role in social interaction during Buddhist meditation (Kurzon, 2007(Kurzon, , 2011Ephratt, 2008). Fennell (2012) analyzed the silences created in an unprogrammed Quaker Meeting for Worship as well as the meditation practices of three Buddhist groups: a sitting group associated with a Vipassana organization, a Zen sitting group under the leadership of a person ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh, and a temple under the leadership of a Zen priest of the Soto school. ...
... After the highly influential analysis by Sacks and colleagues (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1978), numerous studies have acknowledged and investigated the communicative role of silence in conversation. It was found to range from emphasizing key elements (Duez, 1997;Strangert, 2003), marking discourse boundaries (Boomer, Dittman, 1962;Esposito, Stejskal, Smékal & Bourbakis, 2007), working as discourse marker for turn-taking management (Ephratt, 2008), to manifesting hesitation in speech or troubles in information processing and need for clarification. In particular, longer silences have been associated with speech processing problems (Chowdhury, Stepanov, Danieli & Riccardi, 2017;Schettino, Di Maro & Cutugno, 2020). ...
This study concerns hesitation strategies that tourist guides may use to manage their speech, with particular attention to individual variability. Previous work has pointed out that hesitation phenomena may occur as a tool to structure discourse and gain visitors' attention, and that linguistic idiosyncratic behavior may affect their production. Given these findings, the proposed investigation delves deeper into the linguistic analysis of formal, phonetic, and functional aspects of hesitations occurring in a small corpus of Italian tourist guides' speech. It aims at describing the speaker-specific and common uses of hesitation phenomena and whether different types of hesitations and their phonetic features correlate with different discourse functions. From the results, it emerges a formal differentiation between hesitations involved in speech planning for lexical coding and for the structuring of information.
... KonuĢmada çeĢitli iĢlevler gören sessizliklerin de iletiĢim (bkz. Ephratt, 2008), incelik ve kültürle bağlantılı anlamlarının örneklendirilebilmesi (Sifianou, 1992; veya ruhdilbilimsel iĢlevlerinin dilbilimciler tarafından araĢtırılabilmesi için derlem çalıĢmalarında hassas/kesin ölçüme olanak verecek Ģekilde iĢaretlenmeleri gerekmektedir. Sözlü Türkçe Derlemi'nin çeviriyazılarında kullanılan EXMARaLDA Partitur Editor'deki süre göstergesi ve ses dalgası panelinin buna olanak vermekte ve böylelikle ölçünleĢtirmede güvenirlik artmaktadır. ...
The book includes work presented at the 24th National Linguistics Conference held at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, on May 17-18, 2010.
... Yet, Dingli's (2015) wake-up call "We need to talk about silence" can be seen as a tipping point. Since then, advancement in conceptualization and theorization of silence has set in (e.g., Hence, political scholars often employ a cross-disciplinary perspective to grasp silence ontologically and epistemologically, including for instance communication studies (e.g., Tannen and Saville-Troike 1985;Jaworski 1993;Bilmes 1994Bilmes , 1997Kurzon 1998;Thiesmeyer 2003;Ephratt 2008;Schröter 2013;Schröter and Taylor 2018), memory studies (e.g., Ben-Ze'ev, Winter, and Ginio 2010;Assmann and Assmann 2013;Choi 2014;Dessingué and Winter 2016;Fowler 2018;Russell 2018), philosophy (e.g., Wittgenstein 1969;Heidegger 1972;Nietzsche 1999;Picard 2009;Kierkegaard 2013), and sociology (e.g., Dauenhauer 1980;Luhmann and Fuchs 1989;Bellebaum 1992;Zerubavel 2006;Hahn 2014). Still, conceptual and theoretical differences remain. ...
Germany is considered a role model for dealing with past mass atrocities. In particular, the social reappraisal of the Holocaust is emblematic of this. However, when considering the genocide on the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia, it is puzzling that an official recognition was only pronounced after almost 120 years, in May 2021. For a long time, silence surrounded this colonial cruelty in German political discourse. Although the discourse on German responsibility toward Namibia emerged after the end of World War II, it initially appeared detached from the genocide. That silence on colonial atrocities is to be considered a cruelty itself. Studies on silence have been expanding and becoming richer. Building on these works, the paper sets two goals: First, it advances the theorization of silence by producing a new typology, which is then integrated into discourse-bound identity theory. Second, it applies this theory to the analysis of the silencing and later acknowledging of the genocide on the Herero and Nama by German political elites. To this end, Bundestag debates, official documents, and statements by relevant political actors are analyzed in the period from 1980 to 2021. The results reveal the dynamics between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discursive formations, how those are shifting in a period of 40 years, and what role silence plays in it. Beyond our emphasis on the genocide on the Herero and Nama, our findings might benefit future studies as the approach proposed in this paper can make silence a tangible research object for global studies.
... 8-9). The functions of silence in social relationships and its potential meanings in interpersonal communication have been comprehensively explored (Jensen 1973, p. 249;Kurzon 2007Kurzon , p. 1673Johannesen 1974, p. 25;Ephratt 2008Ephratt , p. 1909). Jensen describes five functions of silence: linking people, communicating feelings, revealing knowledge, conveying judgment and activating thinking (1973, pp. ...
The limited literature on Myanmar that touches on aspects of silence often associates it with hierarchies of authority, but silence can also be revealing of hierarchies of privilege. Drawing on Walton’s theorization of Burman-ness as Whiteness and photo-elicitation interviews with twenty young Myanmar citizens, this paper illustrates how Burman structures of privilege manifested empirically in the silence around ethnicity in Burman participants’ identity narratives. I argue that similar to Whiteness, Burman participants’ silence around their ethnicity demonstrates the invisibility of Burman-ness as the natural condition. It is critical to overturn these silences if Burmans are to work against systemic racism and in support of ethnic reconciliation.
Rhetorical questions (henceforth RQs) are one of the significant linguistic forms used by a politician to achieve effective communication strategies The present paper aims at investigating the significance of RQs in political discourse by examining Obama’s and Cameron’s political speeches and comparing them to different social, political, and economic dimensions during the period (2014-2015). The study sample includes twenty speeches: ten speeches for each president. The method of research will be quantitative and qualitative in nature so as to examine the strategic use of RQs by Obama and Cameron to achieve their political goals. More specifically, it examines the functions, features, and types of these questions in light of the topic of speeches. The results show that Cameron is more capable of achieving rhetorical effects in his speeches than Obama and both of them use Wh-questions more than other types of RQs. Besides, the use of RQs in social topics is more than in political and economic topics.
This paper aims to investigate the use of silence during interactions in the English language, cross-culturally, to determine if it is as effective as speech. It seeks to shed light on how British, American, Irish, and Canadian interlocutors use and interpret different types of silence and the functions it fulfills. The hypothesis posits that silence is universally employed by all interlocutors in all cultures and enhances the dynamics of interaction. The data consists of conversations from fifteen video-recorded English TV interviews, adopting Saville-Troike's (1985) and Nakane's (2007) models of analysis. The study concludes that silence serves the function of speech in transmitting and receiving messages, facilitating the aim of communication. Moreover, interlocutors from different cultures within the same language employ silence universally. Verbal and nonverbal communications, including silence, are inseparable, each playing a significant role. Their combined usage enhances the power of communication. Silence serves various functions beyond mere acceptance and refusal; it also encompasses face-saving and face-threatening strategies. Regarding cross-cultural differences in using silence in English, British interlocutors recorded the highest use of silence, followed by Americans, then the Irish, and lastly the Canadians. In addition, the use of silence varies depending on the context of the situation, the conversation's topic, the personalities of the interlocutors, their age, and their level of education.
Chapter 2 laid the conceptual foundations for the treatment of communication and observation as well as group communication. Chapter 3 dealt with the concepts of group and identity. The differences between collective identities, group identities and individual identities were discussed, in the process of which a distinction was made between practical and objectified identities for both group identities and individual identities. Chapter 4 was devoted to identifying eight environments of identity fabrication. This chapter now concretises and extends the conceptual framework created so far by bringing it to bear on the results of empirical studies. Numerous examples plausibilise the conceptual devices introduced earlier and, conversely, are integrated by them into the framework presented. To this end, we first revisit the distinction between precommunicative and communicative processes (Sect. 5.1), as it can now also be discussed in terms of its relations to the environments of identity fabrication. Subsequently, the fabrication of collective identities is examined in more detail (Sect. 5.2). The main focus of the chapter is on the fabrication of group identities (Sect. 5.3). The relationship between narratives, historicity and change, the relations between practice and objectification, possible elements of objectified group identities, the role of external groups and individuals in group identity fabrication, and the dynamics of group identity fabrication are discussed.
Organizational silence means that employees knowingly hide their information, ideas or opinions from their managers in the face of developing events related to their work or the institution they work for. Life satisfaction is the individual's positive assessment of all areas in his life according to the criteria created by himself. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the organizational silence levels and life satisfaction of academics and to identify possible differences in terms of demographic variables. The study group of the research consists of 106 academicians who were selected by random sampling at two foundation universities in Istanbul. “Demographic Information Scale” prepared by the researcher as a data
collection tool, “Organizational Silence Scale” developed by Dyne, Ang and Botero (2003) and adapted to Turkish by Karacaoğlu and Cingöz (2009) and Diener, Emmons, Larsen and “Life Satisfaction Scale”, which was developed by Griffin (1985) and adapted to Turkish by Köker (1991), was used. The data obtained in the study planned as cross-sectional descriptive were analyzed and interpreted in SPSS 15 statistical package program.
Keywords: Voice, Organizational Silence, Life Satisfaction, Academician
What is the catalytic element that brings about widespread participation in a mass campaign? Is it ideology? Self-interest? Emotional states of fear, hatred, or love? Taking into account the recent proliferation of sound studies approaches to the history of the People's Republic of China, this article explores this question through the sonic experience of the campaign. Previous studies of the soundscapes of the Mao era have focused upon state initiatives of sound-borne propaganda and their role in the transmission of revolutionary ideas. Using a case study of the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns of 1956–58, I examine the reception of such propaganda with a focus on silence, sound, and voice and their affective qualities. Through the use of diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and interviews, I explore the extra-linguistic aspects of the campaign to ask what, outside of revolutionary words and emotions, brought the subjects of a campaign from silence to vocal participation.
During the First World War, which saw unprecedented use of heavy artillery, silence itself could be a profound message. In this discursive context the absence of a letter from the front could mean the potential death of the writer. While research has been carried out on war correspondence (Helmers in Languages and the First World War: Representation and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 54–72, 2016, Housiel in Dire la guerre: le discours épistolaire des combattants français de, Lambert-Lucas, Limoges, 14–18, 2014, Sandersen in Multilingua-journal of Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 26:247–278, 2007) and general remarks on silence during the war can be observed in Walker (Words and the First World War. Language, Memory, Vocabulary, Bloomsbury, London & New York, 2017), no studies have been found investigating the role of silence in an Anglophone corpus. While most linguistic research on the subject of silence and silencing is often restricted to spoken contexts, evaluating silence in delayed written discourse remains more elusive. Following examples of the roles silence and silencing play in First World War correspondence, a qualitative and data-driven analysis will investigate their linguistic manifestations. Drawing upon Jakobson’s model of language functions (Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Linguistics and poetics”. In T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 350–377.) and Ephratt’s elaboration (Ephratt, Journal of Pragmatics 40:1909–1938, 2008) to encompass silence, examples from the corpus will be classified according to function. Thus, the analysis aims to contribute to the growing area of research on silence and silencing, underscoring its very eloquent nature, ranging from a lack of time or news to a breakdown in the communicative channel and (self-)censorship.KeywordsHistorical discourse analysisPrivate correspondenceWar lettersSilence and Silencing
Silences around drone warfare and similar covert state practices have often been encountered as a hurdle that hinders us from understanding and interrogating government acts. Scholars as well as human rights actors have opposed silences in a struggle for greater transparency and have called on governments to speak. Through the case study of drone warfare, this paper analyses the productive role of silences and the political struggle to oppose it. Analysing 125 non-governmental organisation (NGO) reports, UN documents and policy papers, this article investigates how silences are encountered, interpreted and opposed by Western human rights actors. This shows that silence is not encountered as a discrete unit but as interdependent layers of denial, partial withholding of information, redactions, delays, lack of oversight and so on. Situated within unequal power relations, I show how the battle against the unsaid is itself based on what has (not) been heard in Western constructions of drone warfare and risks further enabling violent practices. Discussing ways of subverting the workings of silence, the paper not only contributes to academic literature on covert warfare and silence but also speaks to the practical dilemmas faced by non-state actors who are advocating for more transparency.
The chapter focuses on cultural-cognitive dimensions of eloquent silence in situations where the act of not speaking is purposeful and carries semiotic meaning. The setting under investigation is that of predominantly L2 English-speaking Black communities in South Africa, in particular those that have Sotho, Tswana and Xhosa as (one of) their first language(s) and any variety of Black South African English either as a second/third/fourth/additional language in their repertoire (see Peters and Coetzee-Van Rooy 2020; Coetzee-Van Rooy and Peters 2021). On the basis of four linguistic corpora comprising about 4.3 million words, the chapter demonstrates how ample lexical strategies are used in (Black South African) English to reference silence. It analyses the conceptual framework SILENCE AS COMMUNICATION on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative evidence and discusses three conceptualisations of silence that exist in the Black South African context: (a) SILENCE AS SOCIAL-HIERARCHICAL CONVENTION (SILENCE AS RESPECT), (b) SILENCE AS INTEGRAL PART OF A RITUAL, and (c) SILENCE AS ANCESTRAL INTERVENTION. The chapter is placed against the larger background of cultural-cognitive research on speech communities in sub-Saharan Africa and communicates with previous studies such as, e.g., Wolf (2001), Agyekum (2002), Polzenhagen (2007), Peters (2021a, b), and Wolf and Peters (2022).
Silence is one of the forgotten and/or undermined aspect of language that otherwise play a very important role in communicative purpose. It is believed that silence is merely the opposite to speech or communication; whereas this study negates this standpoint and proves it to be as vital and communicative as speech itself is. This paper aims at most significant works of the writer with a detailed analysis of Silence in the linguistic field of study by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It aims at answering the question whether Silence in communication helps the speaker and/or the listener in the context of discourse or not? It focuses on the significant role that Silence plays in the context of communication – taking into consideration Woolf's two novels namely 'To the Lighthouse and between the Acts'. Various sources have been taken into consideration while compiling this endeavor to prove it to be a great addition to the body of knowledge in general and to linguistics in particular. In the end, it is proved that Silence is a very vital element in discourse with the help of given reference from the mentioned texts.
Corpus linguistics continues to be a vibrant methodology applied across highly diverse fields of research in the language sciences. With the current steep rise in corpus sizes, computational power, statistical literacy and multi-purpose software tools, and inspired by neighbouring disciplines, approaches have diversified to an extent that calls for an intensification of the accompanying critical debate. Bringing together a team of leading experts, this book follows a unique design, comparing advanced methods and approaches current in corpus linguistics, to stimulate reflective evaluation and discussion. Each chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of different datasets and techniques, presenting a case study and allowing readers to gauge methodological options in practice. Contributions also provide suggestions for further reading, and data and analysis scripts are included in an online appendix. This is an important and timely volume, and will be essential reading for any linguist interested in corpus-linguistic approaches to variation and change.
Long neglected as a primary impetus of study, textual silences abound in such field disciplines as geology, where most field results seem to ‘disappear’ from the published research article. This paper first discusses the nature of textual silence and then proposes a typology of textual silences associated with written scientific discourse. Next, by examining the different disciplinary genres involved in the “recontextualizations” of a fieldwork study in geology, this study seeks to (1) identify textual silence in the various recontextualizations and (2) offer explanations for it.
Fluency and hesitation in spontaneous speech have previously been shown to be symptomatic of variations in word transition probability. The purpose of the present experiment was to corroborate this conclusion by evidence demonstrating the influence of transition probability (amount of information) on selective behaviour stimulated in an experimental situation.
An experiment in sentence completion was designed in such a way as to recreate the conditions for word selection in sentences. As a result word transition probability was shown to be related not only to incidence but also to the length of hesitation pauses within sentences. The completion of gaps substituted for words that had originally been preceded by pauses required a significantly longer period of hesitation than the completion of gaps substituted for words which had been uttered fluently. A relation was thus shown to exist between periods of hesitation before verbalisation in different persons performing different operations within the same linguistic setting. The conditions under which this relation has been shown to hold have been found to be those of successful anticipation of the original speaker's intentions.
Introduction In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world's languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. Passive as a foregrounding and backgrounding operation. Consider the following sentences: (1) a. Mary slapped John. b. John was slapped. c. John was slapped by Mary. Functionally speaking, passives such as (1b) and (1c) may be considered foregrounding constructions compared with the syntactically less marked and pragmatically more neutral active, (1a): they ‘topicalize’ (‘foreground’, ‘draw our attention to’) an element, John, which is not normally presented as topical in the active. To this extent passives are similar to what we shall here call topicalizations, (2b) below, and left-dislocations, (3b) below, both prominent foregrounding constructions across the world's languages. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
While the modern law of evidence has focused on the suspect as the key source of evidence, in fact this is a relatively recent development. Until the early 1990s the privilege against self-incrimination was firmly enshrined in the law of evidence. The privilege is used in a broad sense to cover immunity from being compelled to answer questions put by the police or other bodies, or in court, that may incriminate the speaker. It has also in the past included protection from adverse comment by judges on the failure to give evidence at trial or to answer questions in interrogation.
The courtroom and even more informal courtroom-like settings have been found to be coercive contexts for those placed in the position of answering questions. Yet the speech situation of the police interview or police interrogation is perhaps a more coercive one from the standpoint of asymmetrical power relationships between interlocutors, since there is no judge present to control the behaviour of the interrogators. It is not by chance that interrogation manuals written by the police for police interrogators specifically advise them not to handcuff or shackle the suspect during the interrogation (Inbau, Reid and Buckley, 1986, p. 40; Van Meter and Bopp, 1973, p. 41), or be armed in the interrogation room (Inbau et al. 1986, p. 41), or ‘deny him the human comforts he is entitled to’, including the right ‘to use the bathroom occasionally, eat at regular times, drink water occasionally …’ (Van Meter and Bopp, 1973, p. 51). Such manuals go out of their way to make these points because, as they themselves acknowledge, police brutality toward detainees has been common in the past and continues to exist in the present.1
This chapter describes the spiral of silence, a theory first introduced in 1972 and published as a book in 1980. It argues that public opinion did not appear first in the eighteenth century, but has existed in all human societies for thousands of years as a force exerted on governments and individuals, creating and maintaining the consensus necessary for society’s functioning. The word public in the concept of “public opinion” is to be interpreted in the sense of “public eye,” “visible to all,” and thus as social control. Opinion refers to publicly visible and audible expressions of opinion as well as public behavior regarding value-laden issues. Its power derives from our social nature, from the willingness of society to threaten isolation in reaction to forbidden opinions and behaviors, and from the individual’s fear of isolation. This fear causes individuals to register continually any changes in society’s approval by means of a “quasi-statistical sense,” and to voice agreement upon increase in approval and to remain silent upon decrease, thus contributing to further decline in the popularity of the originally held opinion. The pressure of public opinion is a source of constant conflict for governments in weighing measures in order to win public support. Individuals also experience ongoing conflict between their individual inclinations and convictions and the social demands to conform. This chapter discusses the consequences of public opinion for the classical theory of democracy and for an understanding of mass media effects. The chapter also provides hypotheses and methods for testing them, and presents the example of public opinion concerning nuclear energy.
The ability to produce and understand referring expressions is basic to human language use and human cognition. Reference comprises the ability to think of and represent objects (both real and imagined/fictional), to indicate to others which of these objects we are talking about, and to determine what others are talking about when they use a nominal expression. The articles in this volume are concerned with some of the central themes and challenges in research on reference within the cognitive sciences-philosophy (including philosophy of language and mind, logic, and formal semantics), theoretical and computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology. The papers in the volume address four basic questions: What is reference? What is the appropriate analysis of different referring forms, such as definite descriptions? How is reference resolved? and How do speaker/writers select appropriate referring forms, such as pronouns vs. full noun phrases, demonstrative vs. personal pronouns, and overt vs. null/zero pronominal forms? Some of the papers assume and build on existing theories, such as Centering Theory and the Givenness Hierarchy framework; others propose their own models of reference understanding and/or production. The articles examine reference from a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by different research traditions and employing different methodologies. While the contributors to the volume were primarily trained in one of the four represented disciplines-computer science, linguistics, philosophy and psychology, and use methodologies typical of that discipline - each of them bridges more than one discipline in their work and their approach.
This investigation assesses interobserver agreement on conversation analytic (CA) transcription. Four professional CA transcribers spent a maximum of 3 hours transcribing 2.5 minutes of a previously unknown, naturally occurring, mundane telephone call. Researchers unitized transcripts into words, sounds, silences, inbreaths, outbreaths, and laugh tokens, and then coded each of 1,827 units on as many as 15 transcription dimensions. Agreement was assessed using Cohen's kappa for nominal level data: Speaker designation, unit sequencing, semantics, orthography, cutoff, and plosiveness reached the level of "substantial" agreement (90% or greater accuracy). Pitch, overlap, doubt, and smile voice reached the level of "moderate" agreement (80-89% accuracy), while pace, sound stretch, underline/amplitude, and intonation fell below acceptability except when examined post hoc as presence versus absence of the feature. Silence lengths, examined as ratio-level data, were reliable at the "acceptable" level (alpha ≥.70) among those using a counting method (as opposed to stopwatch or other mechanical means). We make recommendations for transcription training.
Is the Miranda warning, which lets an accused know of the right to remain silent, more about procedural fairness or about the conventions of speech acts and silences? Do U.S. laws about Native Americans violate the preferred or traditional "silence" of the peoples whose religions and languages they aim to "protect" and "preserve"? InJust Silences, Marianne Constable draws on such examples to explore what is at stake in modern law: a potentially new silence as to justice. Grounding her claims about modern law in rhetorical analyses of U.S. law and legal texts and locating those claims within the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, Constable asks what we are to make of silences in modern law and justice. She shows how what she calls "sociolegal positivism" is more important than the natural law/positive law distinction for understanding modern law. Modern law is a social and sociological phenomenon, whose instrumental, power-oriented, sometimes violent nature raises serious doubts about the continued possibility of justice. She shows how particular views of language and speech are implicated in such law. But law--like language--has not always been positivist, empirical, or sociological, nor need it be. Constable examines possibilities of silence and proposes an alternative understanding of law--one that emerges in the calling, however silently, of words to justice. Profoundly insightful and fluently written,Just Silencessuggests that justice today lies precariously in the silences of modern positive law.
The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is a classic example of a conspiracy of silence, a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth. But the denial of social realities - whether incest, alcoholism, corruption, or even genocide - is no fairy tale. This book sheds light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial - the keeping of "open secrets." The author shows that conspiracies of silence exist at every level of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics. He also shows how such conspiracies evolve, illuminating the social pressures that cause people to deny what is right before their eyes. We see how each conspirator's denial is symbiotically complemented by the others', and learn that silence is usually more intense when there are more people conspiring - and especially when there are significant power differences among them. The author concludes by showing that the longer we ignore "elephants," the larger they loom in our minds, as each avoidance triggers an even greater spiral of denial. Drawing on examples from newspapers and comedy shows to novels, children's stories, and film, the book travels back and forth across different levels of social life, and from everyday moments to large-scale historical events. At its core, it helps us understand why we ignore truths that are known to all of us.
Cover Blurb: Researching Lived Experience introduces an approach to qualitative research methodology in education and related fields that is distinct from traditional approaches derived from the behavioral or natural sciences—an approach rooted in the “everyday lived experience” of human beings in educational situations. Rather than relying on abstract generalizations and theories, van Manen offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation.
The book offers detailed methodological explications and practical examples of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry. It shows how to orient oneself to human experience in education and how to construct a textual question which evokes a fundamental sense of wonder, and it provides a broad and systematic set of approaches for gaining experiential material that forms the basis for textual reflections.
Van Manen also discusses the part played by language in educational research, and the importance of pursuing human science research critically as a semiotic writing practice. He focuses on the methodological function of anecdotal narrative in human science research, and offers methods for structuring the research text in relation to the particular kinds of questions being studied. Finally, van Manen argues that the choice of research method is itself a pedagogic commitment and that it shows how one stands in life as an educator.
The purpose of this paper is to suggest areas of needed forensic linguistic research into the use of the warnings that the police are required to give suspects about their rights as they are being arrested. In this case, the American Miranda warnings are used as an example. Familiar linguistic issues arise in such warnings, including discourse sequencing, coerciveness of questions, volition, comprehension, functional equivalence, the co-operative principle, agreement, topic recycling and intentionality.
In this article, we explore the process of psychoanalytical listening in the context of language. We demonstrate through a clinical example how listening may act as a facilitator of a person's linguistic style, but also how the defence of negation blocks the same process. Guided by the modern speculations on the function of metaphor, we show how listening has been expressed in various metaphors and other “tropes” of language by psychoanalysts, and also how useful metaphors can be in our listening to patients.
Hotly contested and vigorously defended since it was first written into the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech is a basic right that all Americans hold dear. But what of the freedom not to speak? Should, for instance, a special prosecutor be able to compel a mother to testify about, and incriminate, her own daughter? The freedom not to speak is an implicit "right" that holds great relevance for all of us-the freedom not to speak when commanded by church and state, not to sign an oath, not to salute a flag, not to assert a belief in God, or not to reveal one's political beliefs and associations. Bosmajian traces the history of the freedom not to speak from the Middle Ages and Inquisition to the twentieth century and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His history addresses the Civil War and Reconstruction loyalty oaths by Union Confederate soldiers, and the expulsion of Jehovah's Witnesses from schools for refusing to salute the flag, and includes an analysis of coerced speech in a variety of literary works. Bosmajian also contemplates the future of this right to silence and argues for the importance of a specifically labeled and firmly established freedom not to speak.
The "Miranda Rights" were designed so that every person who is arrested understands that s/he need not answer any questions without an attorney being present and that, if needed, an attorney will be appointed without charge to the suspect. However, an analysis of the complexity of the language of the rights reveals an average eighth grade level of reading difficulty with fifty percent comprehension and a thirteenth grade level of aural comprehension difficulty with one hundred percent comprehension. Clearly, any suspect of limited English speaking ability or limited educational background could have difficulty understanding the rights as read to her/him. This paper describes the process used to determine if a Thai individual, of a limited English speaking background, seemed to have enough proficiency in English to understand his rights and then to waive them.
Combining methods from ethnoscience and sociolinguistics, this paper presents an hypothesis to account for why, in certain types of situations, members of Western Apache society refrain from speech. Though cross-cultural data on silence behavior are almost wholly lacking, some evidence has been collected which suggests that this hypothesis may have relevance to other societies as well.
A primary goal of contemporary theoretical linguistics is to develop a theory of the correspondence between sound (or gesture) and meaning. This sound-meaning correspondence breaks down completely in the case of ellipsis, and yet various forms of ellipsis are pervasive in natural language: words and phrases which should be in the linguistic signal go missing. How this should be possible is the focus of Jason Merchant's investigation. He focuses on the form of ellipsis known as sluicing, a common feature of interrogative clauses, such as in 'Sally's out hunting - guess what!'; and 'Someone called, but I can't tell you who'. It is the most frequently found cross-linguistic form of ellipsis. Dr Merchant studies the phenomenon across twenty-four languages, and attempts to explain it in linguistic and behavioural terms.
Four of the six functions of linguistic communication postulated by Roman Jakobson were applied to twenty color reproductions of modern paintings. The functions were: Emotive self-expression of the addresser, the poetic (more general aesthetic) function (concerning the material aspects of the message), the conative function (concerning the persuasion of the addressee) and the referential function (applied to the context). Thirty artistically trained and thirty “lay persons” rated the paintings on 5-point scales, expressing degrees of agreement with two statements descriptive of each function. Factor analysis resulted in four factors representing the functions under study. Analyses of variance with the factor scores of the twenty paintings allowed their ranking on the functions for visual comparison. Further analyses of variance showed significant differences for the aesthetic (artistically trained high) and referential function (lay persons high). There were also significant differences between male and female subjects on the referential dimension.