Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
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Joseph Oduro-Frimpong
His research interests include communicology of African media (Nollywood), human sexuality, and interpersonal relationships.
Abstract
Communication scholars' early interest in the function of silence in human interactions produces different theorizations about the phenomenon. Contemporary interest is evidenced in a plethora of research exploring different domains of how silence is utilized in human interaction. Despite the sustained interest in the function of silence in human communication, there is a paucity of research examining how intimate partners use silence as a conflict-management strategy. Consequently, there is an impoverished understanding on how such couples manage their marital conflicts using silence. This study thus investigates how married couples use silence as a conflict management strategy in their relationships. Using a qualitative paradigm — specifically the semiotic phenomenological perspective — and analyzing the research data through Lanigan's three-step methodology, I discover participants' experiences with silence in conflict situations with their spouses. The analysis reveals four themes that describe the experiences of married couples using silence as conflict-management tactic. Discussion of the themes reveals important findings as to how participants use silence in three ways to manage the inevitable conflicts that arise within their relationships.
About the author
His research interests include communicology of African media (Nollywood), human sexuality, and interpersonal relationships.
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
- Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded
- Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
- Bridging theories: A logical-functional perspective on languages
- The ‘handles’ and ‘sides’ of metaphor
- Here is the author! Hyperlinks as constitutive rules of hypertextual communication
- Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
- The serpent's egg: Communication and the bio-semiotics of image making
- Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry
- Symbol-intertextuality-deconstruction (on the dialectic of stability and variability of concept and symbol)
- Analyse paradigmatique d'un corpus de proverbes à l'aide des matrices de concepts
- Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
- Peirce on categories: Towards a metaphysical foundation of pragmatics
- Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
- Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
- Structures and semiotic systems
- Eye on Picasso
