Forms and Functions of Silence and Silencing in Conversational Analysis and Psychotherapeutic Interactions

Silence has been considered for a long time simply as absence of talk, in this sense not relevant for conversation analysis. Only in the last two decades silence has turned out to be an important research field for linguistic investigation (Ephratt 2008), particularly for multimodal analysis (Kwiatkowska 1997). Every filled moment in a dialogue requires “unfilled” frames, i.e. “silent phases”, which turn out to be essential for the succeeding of a communicative exchange. Silence as a constitutive part of every communicative exchange can have a variety of motives: a) it can be motivated by a way of attunement with the partner which does not require words (“embodied silence” according to Acheson 2008, often accompanied by nonverbal means); in this sense, people who have a great degree of confidence can “sustain” more silent phases than people who are not so close to each other (Watts 1997); b) silence can be an expression of the will of listening and “giving (communicative) space” to the Other, as it is attested by filled pauses as feedback signals (Buchholz 2018); the duration of the pauses and their function of structuring the turns and segmenting the sequential order of a dialogue (Goodwin 1980a and 1980b) is not only related to idiosyncratic factors, but also to wider cultural features (Sifianou 1997); c) silence indicates not only disinterest in the Other (lapses and “disengaging”) and signalizes severe communicative discomfort (like in the cases of breaks in self-repairs and anacoluthes) or even the refusal of communicative exchange (Ephratt 2008), but it can be also an instrument of self-promotion and self-stylization aimed at gaining power (Kenny 2011). Analogically, silencing can be motivated by various causes, which range from a defense reaction to an open act of aggression (Joseph, forthcoming). Both silence and silencing can be reactive or proactive behaviors, and even raise to forms of aggression and offence (Wardhaugh 1986: 234). Furthermore, silence and silencing have been studied in the light of communication behaviors like verbosity and talkativeness (Gold et al. 1994), individual saliency (Kecskes 2004). In the present paper we will try to give a classification of the forms and functions of silence and silencing in the light of their communicative valence.