A Relevance-theoretic Approach to Turn Silence

DOI

10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.241How to use a DOI?

Keywords

turn silence; Relevance Theory; Conversational Analysis

Abstract

The understanding of silence has been approached in various fields of research such as philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, etc. Researches in these fields have defined silence by clarifying its varied forms, functions and other distinctive perspective. In linguistics, Levinson's distinction of three types of silence has laid typological foundation for the investigation of silence within the framework of Conversational Analysis (CA) and pragmatics. Turn silence is the most studied among the three types of silence in linguistic inquiry. This paper firstly discusses turn silence within the framework of CA, which seems to fail to account for the communicators' psychological factors, i.e., why they resort to silence rather than other means of communication in order to avoid giving a dispreferred response. Then it explores turn silence within the framework of Relevance Theory (RT), including the informative and communicative intentions conveyed by it and its relevance and the contextual effects, moreover, some important factors affecting the use and interpretation of turn silence. Through the discussion and exploration, it is found that turn silence itself is a speech rather than the failure of communication. This paper also suggests that research on turn silence within the framework of RT might be conducive to further cross-cultural study and the study of silence in classroom teaching.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chunrong Wang
PY  - 2019/07
DA  - 2019/07
TI  - A Relevance-theoretic Approach to Turn Silence
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1078
EP  - 1084
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.241
DO  - 10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.241
ID  - Wang2019/07
ER  -