Analysis of Silence in Interaction

Abstract Silence has long been regarded as meaningful in interaction. Since the 1970s, there have appeared studies of silence, which analyze the functions of silence in interaction. At first, there were sporadic publications such as Bruneau (1973), Jensen (1973), and Johannesen (1974), but in the middle of the 1980s the first collection of papers on silence was published (Tannen & Saville‐Troike, 1985), which included a broad range of papers on silence not only in, for example, conversation, worship, witness questioning in court, and the classroom, but also from a cross‐cultural perspective. This was followed, over a decade later, by a second collection (Jaworski, 1997), which included studies of silence and politeness, markedness theory, and silence in medical interviews as well as silence “beyond language,” such as in painting and in music. Furthermore, two monographs (Jaworski, 1993; Kurzon, 1997) were published in the 1990s as well as several other articles. Linguistic research into silence has since expanded with, for example, Cortini (2001), and a further collection edited by Jaworski (2005), which includes papers on silence in institutional settings such as the classroom, television reporting, and antenatal clinics.