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For the above reasons, the author is going to discuss the innate nature of silence, study how silence can be meaningful mainly from the pragmatic-cognitive point of view and the use of silence as a strategy of interpersonal communication. From the study, the author intends to learn the meaning of silence in conversational discourse linguistically and psychologically. At the same time, the author aims at documenting people who are aware of the role of silence can conduct more effective communication and providing strategies for interpersonal communication based on comprehensive understanding of silence.
1.2 The Previous Study
For years, silence has been studied from aspects of its function and psychological, sociological approaches have also been used in the past five decades. The study of silence abroad focuses on several questions: How to clarify silence? How can silence create meaning in conversational discourse? What are the functions of silence? First, Jensen (1973) and Bruneau (1973) look at silence from the angle of pragmaticism. Jensen identifies five functions of silence, including function of linking, affecting, activating, revelation and judgment. However, the frequency of type’s silence, which should be differentiated, is not mentioned. Bruneau classifies silence into three forms: psychological, interactive and sociocultural. What's more, Kurzon (2007) put forward another classification of silence according to the characteristics of interpersonal communication: conversational silence, thematic silence, textual silence and situational silence. Those types of silence are distinctive because he gives a large amount of vivid examples in his classification. Another major way of studying silence is based on discourse analysis. Silence is considered as the interactive locus of turn-taking during discourse in Sacks (1974) et al.'s paper. Levinson (1983) categorizes silence into three kinds: within-turn silence, inter-turn silence and turn silence. As both form and function of silence have been taken into consideration, his categorization is widely accepted by scholars abroad.
In China, the study of silence mainly develops from two aspects: communicative function and conversational implicature. To begin with, as silence plays a crucial role in interpersonal communication, scholars are interested in the difference of people's understanding of silence within different culture. Song Li (1998) says that the western people are more likely to perceive silence in a negative way than the eastern people because of their different way of decoding language and philosophical view of the functions of language. Though such perceptions are probably resulted from some stereotypes as people share certain interpretations of silence according to the specific contexts, her contrastive analysis raises much awareness of the communicative role of silence in light of different culture background. Yang Ping (1996) and Xu Jinfen, Wu Weiping (2004) also discusses how people of various culture background observe and act differently towards silence. Secondly, some domestic scholars treated silence as unseparable component of the conversation. Zuo Yan(1996) clarifies several basic conception of conversation analysis such as"turn","turn silence""adjacency pair" and other parameters of silence. His relative thorough and systematical introduction of silence in conversational analysis is noteworthy in China as few articles focusing the study of silence can be found before 1996. However, as contextual effect of turn silence in conversational discourse can not be fully explained through Conversational Analysis Theory, it is later interpreted in view of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) and its pragmatic meaning has been illustrated from cognitive linguistics (Gong Weidong and Wu Xueyan 2003; Tian Chengquan and Guo Kun 2007; Gan Shi'an and Ding Ling 2008). Besides, Zhou Shujiang (2010) discusses both the micro context and macro context to achieve the conversational implicature of turn silence.