Table Of ContentDISCOURSE OF SILENCE
Pragmatics & Beyond
New Series
Editor:
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Jef Verschueren
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49
Dennis Kurzon
Discourse of Silence
DISCOURSE OF
SILENCE
DENNIS KURZON
University of Haifa
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
In memory of my brother-in-law
Marcel
“Silence is deep as Eternity”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kurzon, Dennis
Discourse of silence / Dennis Kurzon.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 49)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Silence (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series.
BD360.K87 1997
302.2--dc21 97044558
isbn 978 90 272 5062 9 (EUR) / 978 1 55619 811 3 (US) (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8260 6 (Eb)
© 1998 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
CONTENTS
Preface 1
1. The Semiotics of Silence 5
1. Silence as a sign 5
2. Silence and non-verbal communication 9
3. Survey of research on silence 19
4. Review of book 23
2. Modality of Silence 25
1. Question-answer adjacency pair 25
2. Unintentional silence 33
3. Knowledge and ability 37
4. The basic model of silence 40
5. The interpretation process 45
3. The Transitivization of Silence: Legal Discourse 51
1. Introduction 51
2. Silence in Anglo-American criminal proceedings 52
3. Changes in the law on the right of silence 57
4. Silence in French and Israeli law 63
5. Talmudic discussions of silent legal parties 66
6. Transitivization of silence and reported speech 70
4. The Silence and Silencing of Darcy 73
1. Authorial power 73
2. The Netherfield ball scene 75
3. "So easy a distance" 86
4. Silence and distance 88
Vi DISCOURSE OF SILENCE
. The Silence and Silencing of Moses 91
1. The textual status of Exodus 91
2. The revelation and its aftermath 92
3. From uncircumcised to circumcised lips 100
4. Moses' anger 102
5. Schoenberg's Moses und Aron 105
6. Silence and music 112
. The Sounds of Silence 113
1. Silence and Bergman's The Silence 113
2. The generation gap 115
3. Silence and song in The Graduate 116
4. Local music 123
5. Benjamin's silence 124
Postscript 129
Notes 131
Appendix I 137
Appendix II 141
Appendix III 144
Bibliography 147
Indexes
PREFACE
"Discourse of silence" is a sufficiently general title to cover all that is found in
this work. But why is the title "discourse of silence," and not "the discourse" or
"a discourse"? Has English suddenly developed a feature found in Slavonic lan
guages in which noun phrases do not have any articles? This inherent ambiguity
in article-less noun phrases, usually solved by contextualization, may be seen as
an aid in enabling us to cover the two interpretations of the title - this is a dis
course about silence ("the discourse of silence") and a discourse about how
people relate to silence in specific texts (each text being "a discourse of si
lence"). One way of showing these two meanings is the hybrid form a/the, but
since in a title, articles may be left out, I have adopted a far better solution.
Discourse, in one of its various meanings, refers to the interaction of a
text with the environment in which the text is used. Discourses may be analysed
in terms of pragmatic parameters such that a speech act theory would provide,
e.g. the felicity conditions of a Searlian approach. They may be seen from a so
ciological perspective with a focus on parameters such as gender, age, socio
economic status. Discourses may be analysed in terms of the performance fea
tures of everyday conversation, which would offer contextual explanations for
hesitations, false starts, and even silences or pauses. They may be seen from a
grammatical point-of-view, with the examination of sentence structure and, per
haps in natural conversation, the grammar of ellipsis. The discourse of silence
will be discussed from all these perspectives.
However, let us concentrate here on the fourth and final item on the list
above. How can we relate, for example, to a "grammar of silence"? If we mean
by grammar those traditional divisions - morphology and syntax, then it has to
be shown that in discussing silence, we may talk about the morphology and
syntax of silence. In grammatical terms, we may say that silence is a noun that
refers to a state, more specifically to the absence of a particular activity; this ac-
2 DISCOURSE OF SILENCE
tivity is, of course, speech. In English there is no monolexical verb form to de
note that the verbal subject is silent. In other words, there is no structure
NP + Verb, with the meaning 'be silent'
for silence in such a structure is not coded. We have to use, instead, the struc
ture:
NP + be + silent
which is stative par excellence through the use of the verb to be. There are lan
guages that do have a monolexical verb equivalent to 'be silent.' In French, for
example we find the reflexive verb se taire, so "taisez-vous" is the imperative
(and "je me tais," Ί am silent,' could be considered in certain circumstances to
be self-contradictory). Hebrew, too, has one single verb denoting 'to be silent'
lishtok. In his analysis of metapragmatic verbs from 81 languages, Verschueren
(1989) cites eighteen languages in which there is found a monolexical verb with
the meaning 'to be silent.' Despite the stative nature of the phrase "to be silent,"
we shall see that one of the two types of silence - intentional silence - is very
much an activity, in which case it has to be considered dynamic in meaning. The
typical stative form of "be silent" in fact does not prevent its being used with
dynamic meaning. To be in English may be used in the progressive aspect, for
example, to connote activity, cf.
"He is foolish" - state
"He is being foolish" - activity, at the time of speaking,
he is behaving foolishly.
When it comes to the interpretation of silence, the gloss given to a silent
response is modal in form, e.g. "I must not talk." A major component of the
grammar of silence concerns modality, both as a formal feature, covering the
verbs may, must, will, shall, can (and the quasi-modal need), and also as a set
of semantic features.
But we have not completed our survey of the morpho-syntax of silence,
for by analogy with the creative possibilities found in English word formation,
the noun can be transformed into a verb - by zero-derivation. The noun silence
is transformed into the verb to silence. Moreover, it becomes an active verb,
both in the syntactic sense (subject + verb + object), and in its real-world sense
in that silencing is an activity. The verb to silence is now a transitive verb whose
subject, in the active form, is the agent who imposes silence on the object or
patient (allowing for both formal and functional views of grammar). As with the
monolexicality of be silent in languages grouped into one set on the basis of lin
guistic typology, this transitivization of silence (and of silence - the phenome-
PREFACE
non in the real world, as we shall see) is not found in many languages; excep
tional cases are those languages with a morphologically distinct causative form,
e.g. in Hebrew lehashtik, 'to silence.'
The "discourse of silence" may be seen from two viewpoints: (1) A mo
dal perspective of silence, which integrates grammatical, semantic and prag
matic analyses, involving a discussion of the interpretation of silence as an inte
gral part of a conversation, almost exclusively in terms of the question-answer
adjacency pair. (2) The syntactic perspective of the transitivization of silence, in
which an agent has the power to impose silence on other persons.
"Discourse of silence" has another meaning not yet touched upon, but
nevertheless important to this work. This derives from the ambiguity of the
preposition of. One of its meanings is 'belonging to,' and that is the meaning that
has been discussed until this point. Its other meaning is 'about.' The question we
may now ask is: how do discourses talk about silence? This involves the inte
gration of the first meaning of "discourse" with the second. So, the first part of
the book - the first two chapters - deals with the grammar of silence, where
"grammar" may approximately be interpreted as rule-governed and model-based
systems. The use of the term "grammar" should not be considered analogous to
Kenneth Burke's definition of grammar (in his Grammar of Motives, 1962) as
principles that are applied to temporal situations; in our case, the explanation of
silence through grammar is more complex. Chapter One examines the applica
tion of semiotic tools to explore several facets of silence in everyday conversa
tion, and reviews various studies of silence that have been published. In Chapter
Two, silence is interpreted in terms of modality, which helps, among other
things, to distinguish between intentional silence and unintentional silence. A
model that integrates a number of different approaches to human interaction is
presented as a means by which the silent answer may be interpreted. On the
whole, the first two chapters offer perspectives on silence directed to the more
semiotics-oriented reader, providing the "beyond," as the title of the series puts
it; these perspectives are constantly in the background to the more pragmatically
based analyses that follow.
The second part of the book consists of analyses of different types of
silence and their context. In Chapter Three, silence - especially the silent answer
- is discussed within the legal context. Moreover, the concept of the transitivi
zation of silence (see above) is set out. This is followed in Chapters Four, Five
and Six by the analyses of the silence of characters in fictional, biblical and
cinematic texts in which the terms of reference gradually expand - from the si
lent answer, through the silencing of characters by authors, to silence as a fea
ture of the generation gap.
