Volume 24, Issue 1-2

It used to be customary to write about silence beginning with a bit of a lament that it was a ‘neglected’ or ‘undervalued’ area of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and other related disciplines. This is no longer necessary nor possible. Since the publication of the major collection of articles by Tannen and Saville-Troike (1985), a steady stream of monographs and anthologies on silence has continued to bring new titles (e. g., Jaworski 1993, 1997; Kurzon 1997; Cacoullos and Sifianou 1998; Thiesmeyer 2003; Julé 2004; Granger 2004), to mention just a few older and more recent examples. They all examine silence from a range of different approaches, or use the concept itself as a useful metalinguistic category and metaphor for the study of a plethora of communicative forms and functions, and critical social issues (see also, e. g., Huckin 2002; Leander 2002). Final anointment to mainstream status, raising silence from the obscurity of one of the most esoteric researchable topics, is the inclusion of whole sections on ‘silence’ in standard textbooks in sociolinguistics (e. g., Mesthrie et al . 2000), discourse analysis (e. g., Johnstone 2002), and nonverbal communication (e. g., Guerrero et al . 1999).

The right to silence is both a fundamental and a controversial element of the legal process. Suspects and defendants are reminded repeatedly of this entitlement, from the moment of arrest, where the police caution explains that ‘you do not have to say anything …’, to the right of defendants in criminal trials to decline to testify in their own defence. However, the decision to remain silent is not a risk-free strategy for the suspect/defendant in the English legal system. Unlike in the US, where criminal juries are instructed that they may not draw any inferences from such a decision, recent changes in the UK mean that English juries are now instructed that they may draw ‘appropriate inferences’ from the defendant’s failure to speak. This paper draws on a corpus of oral jury instructions taken from English criminal trials where the defendant chose to invoke the right to silence at interview and/or during the subsequent trial. It analyses the communicative strategies employed by trial judges in explaining this aspect of the law to juries in their final jury instructions, and includes a discussion of some of the implications of this erosion of the right to silence for both suspects and defendants.

This study is an exploration of the amount of talk used by girls as compared to boys in a Year 2 language classroom located in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The focus is on teacher-led classroom lessons. Data were videotaped, transcribed, measured by way of counting words, and analyzed for conversational opportunities. The findings reveal that being a girl may impact opportunities to speak during classroom lessons and, by extension, may impact language learning opportunities. The girls’ silence (or lack of ‘linguistic space’) appears partially influenced by the teacher’s response to student comments.

This paper examines interaction at a midwives’ ante-natal clinic from the perspective of both participants and illustrates how speech and silence interact to construct the experience of ante-natal care in contemporary Ireland. Using a discourse analysis approach, the perspectives of the professionals and that of the women using the service are described, as are contrasting elements of these perspectives. Silence is defined as issues left unspoken, and three main issues are identified: the active role of women in labour, the possibility of alternatives and choices within and to the current system, and women’s subjective experience of pregnancy and birth. Challenges to the status quo through attempts to introduce topics usually left unspoken are also described. Women are shown to be adept at both introducing their perspective and at attempting to introduce a plurality of voices in the discourse. As midwives conduct the tasks at hand, challenges are quickly relinquished and ultimately the status quo of contemporary antenatal care in which the medical model prevails, is left intact.

This paper explores how people’s expectations regarding talk and non-talk can affect intercultural interactions. Using discourse data from two Chinese–British business meetings together with follow-up interview comments, it describes instances when the participants reacted differently to talk/non-talk, and considers why the differing reactions occurred. It maintains that ‘silence’ can be manifested in ways other than physical non-talk, and argues that people’s perceptions of silence depend on their expectations. Mismatches in expectations, which can occur frequently in intercultural interactions, can result not only in subjective feelings of ‘uncomfortable silence’, but may also lead people to feel they have been ‘forced’ into silence or have not been ‘allowed’ to be silent.

Students from East Asian countries studying at universities in the West are often found to be ‘silent’ or ‘reticent’ in the classroom, and this has been widely described as due to cultural differences in classroom practices and in approaches to knowledge underlying them (Braddock et al. 1995; Ballard 1996; Jones 1999; Liu 2000). However, few attempts have been made to examine interactive situations in the classroom from a micro-analytic perspective. This paper discusses classroom case studies of three Japanese students which involve analysis of recorded classroom interaction and follow-up interviews with the Japanese participants, Australian lecturers and peer students in mainstream university courses in Australia. Through the follow-up interviews, all the Japanese students were found to be perceived ‘silent’ by their lecturers and peers, although the analysis of classroom interaction revealed that the level and type of the silence varied. The findings suggest that the Japanese students’ participation in the classroom is heavily influenced by immediate contextual factors such as the topic, participant structures (Phillips 1972, 1983), and most of all, co-participants’ perceptions and performances. The paper offers an alternative view on the silence attributed to Japanese students, namely that silence can be coconstructed in ongoing negotiation of participation in the classroom.

In this paper we are interested in the use of ‘untold stories’: parts of narratives which are implied rather than explicitly told by speakers. More specifically, we demonstrate how Polish informants from the towns of Gubin and Zgorzelec on the Polish–German border use untold stories as a means of situating themselves or other Poles in a position of advantage in conflictual situations between Poles and Germans. We demonstrate that our informants end the explicit parts of their narratives with markedly ambiguous utterances in order to imply a further part of the story with two interrelated goals: constructing the speakers (or other Poles) as direct ‘winners’ of the conflictual situation and positioning them as having the high moral ground in it. This, furthermore, had the global aim of positive self-presentation of their ethnic group (Poles) and negative presentation of the other ethnic group (Germans). Finally, we argue that the use of the untold stories is related to the particular social and political setting in which they occur, one in which our informants consistently positioned themselves as a ‘losing’, or ‘non-elite’ group being under political and economic ‘attack’ from their German neighbours.

News of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th 2001 spread fast, mainly through dramatic images of the events broadcast via a global television media, particularly 24-hour news channels such as BBC News 24 and CNN. Following the initial report many news channels moved to dedicated live coverage of the story. This move, to what Liebes (1998) describes as a ‘disaster marathon’, entails shifting from the routine, regular news agenda to one where the event and its aftermath become the main story and reference for all other news. In this paper, we draw upon recordings from the BBC News 24 channel on September 11th 2001 during the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon to argue that the coverage of this event, and other similar types of events, may be characterised as news permeated with strategic and emergent silences. Identifying silence as both concrete and metaphorical, we suggest that there are a number of types of silence found in the coverage and that these not only act to cover for lack of new news, or give emphasis or gravitas, but also that the vacuum created by a lack of news creates an emotional space in which collective shock, grieving or wonder are managed through news presented as phatic communion.

Jacques Maurais and Michael A. Morris (eds.), Languages in a Globalising World . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, xx, 345 pp., $ 24.00 (paper). (Alan S. Kaye) Danièle M. Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions . Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. (Korina Giaxoglou) Lesley Milroy and Matthew Gordon, Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation . Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003, pp. v + 261. (Josiane Boutonnet) Li Wei (ed.), The Bilingualism Reader . London: Routledge, 2000, 541 pp. (Alan S. Kaye)