DISCOURSE OF SILENCE Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor: Andreas H. Jucker (Justus Liebig University, Giessen) Associate Editors: Jacob L. Mey (Odense University) Herman Parret (Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp) Jef Verschueren (Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp) Editorial Address: Justus Liebig University Giessen, English Department Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10, D-35394 Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Editorial Board: Shoshana Blum-Kulka (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Chris Butler (University College of Ripon and York) Jean Caron (Université de Poitiers); Roby Carston (University College London) Bruce Fraser {Boston University); John Heritage {University of California at Los Angeles) David Holdcroft (Universit)՝ of Leeds); Sachiko Ide {Japan Women's University) Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (University of Lyon 2) Claudia de Lemos (University of Campinas, Brasil); Marina Sbisà (University of Trieste) Emanuel Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles) Paul O. Takahara (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies) Sandra Thompson (University of California at Santa Barbara) Teun A. Van Dijk (University՝ of Amsterdam); Richard Watts (University of Bern) 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.