SILENCE as a MULTI-PURPOSE SPEECH ACT in TRAUMA DISCOURSE: A CASE STUDY

This study investigates the pragmatic functions of silence in two trauma narratives as a case study; one is a direct narration by the person who experienced the trauma, and the supplementary other is an excerpt from a conversation by three people talking about someone else’s trauma. The contextual conversation analytic investigation is based on 376 tokens of silence and broadly draws on Jakobson’s (1971) six Communicative Functions of Language, and the Relevance Theory with references to the markedness concept from the pragmatic point of view, focusing on the study of illocutionary force of silence and the corresponding speech acts at a communicative level in inter and intra turn pauses. Limited to my data, the analysis revealed that silence has three main functional categories: cognitive, affective, and communicative/cooperative. Cognitive functions help remember the details of the trauma, and re/structuring the ideas before expressing them verbally. Affective ones are employed in order to intensify the preceding or succeeding judgment, an evaluative opinion, or emotional statement in addition to creating narrative expectancy in the story narrated. Silence is, additionally, functional while achieving communicative/cooperative purposes such as topic shift, distancing through indirect speeches, calling for shared information, turn-taking, and improving the narrativization. The data also showed that there are such linguistic patterns as following or being followed by discourse markers or filters, and positional changes depending on the environment as in the cognitive function and the affective function respectively