THE PRAGMATICS OF SILENCE IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A SPEECH ACT PERSPECTIVE
Abstract
In everyday communication, silence frequently carries meaning-it can express agreement, protest, indifference, or deep respect. This article examines whether intentional silence can be classified as a speech act within the Austinian framework. Drawing on the work of Kurzon on "thematic silence" and Sbisà on illocutionary silencing, I argue that while silence lacks a distinct locutionary form, it can indeed perform illocutionary acts under specific contextual conditions. The central claim is that silence functions as an implicit assertive or exercitive act, but its illocutionary force depends critically on shared conventions and hearer uptake. This analysis suggests that speech act theory must expand its boundaries to accommodate non-verbal yet communicative actions.Keyword
- silence ,
- speech act theory ,
- illocutionary force ,
- pragmatics ,
- thematic silence ,
- communicative action ,
- felicity conditions ,
- intentional science ,
- non-verbal communication Introduction. The question posed in the title of this article is not merely a philosophical puzzle. It emerges from a genuine tension within the philosophy of language. On the one hand ,
- Austin's seminal work How to Do Things with Words (1962) demonstrated that utterances do not simply describe the world-they actively do things. When someone says "I promise ,
- " they are not reporting a promise but making one. When a judge says "I sentence you ,
- " the utterance itself constitutes the action. On the other hand ,
- Austin's theory was built around spoken language. His famous distinction between locutionary ,
- illocutionary ,
- and perlocutionary acts assumes that some form of linguistic expression is present
References
- Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press.
- Kurzon, D. (2007). Towards a typology of silence. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(10), 1673–1688.
- Kurzon, D. (2017). Thematic silence as a speech act. In P. Cap & M. Dynel (Eds.), 194 Implicitness: From Lexis to Discourse (pp. 217–232). John Benjamins.
- Sbisà, M. (2023). Illocution and silencing. In Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics (pp. 212–218). Oxford University Press.
- Usmonova, S. (2025). Problems of Revealing the Linguistic and Creative Identity of The Author’s ‘Self’In Newspaper Discourse. Foreign Languages in Uzbekistan, 81-99.
How to Cite
THE PRAGMATICS OF SILENCE IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A SPEECH ACT PERSPECTIVE. (2026). Spectrum of Development, 2(4), 192-194. https://spectrumofdevelopment.com/index.php/sod/article/view/1686
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt this work for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and source, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
License: creativecommons.org
How to Cite
THE PRAGMATICS OF SILENCE IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: A SPEECH ACT PERSPECTIVE. (2026). Spectrum of Development, 2(4), 192-194. https://spectrumofdevelopment.com/index.php/sod/article/view/1686
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