When Does Silence Become Speech Act? Illocutions on the Borderline of Linguistic Action

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that silence in a conversation can be an indirect speech act in Searle’s sense of the concept. The manifold semiotic functions of silence that will be presented in the paper suggest that it is an independent segment in a series of utterances, and thus constitutes a speech act separate from the preceding and following verbal acts. Its interpretation depends on conventions, but these conventions rarely evoke only symbolic procedures in contrast to direct speech acts. In most cases, pauses in speech also initiate a symptomatic interpretation procedure as defined by Rudi Keller, leading to indirect conclusions about the communicative intentions of the speakers.