Silence and Gesture in Interaction: Their Relationship to Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis
Israel Berger
University of Roehampton
E-mail: [email protected]
Although meaningful actions may be present during silence, particularly in the form of gesture, these actions have not been within the remit of traditional approaches to linguistics. In this review, I provide a historical account of key research and theories concerning silence and gesture and their relevance to interactional researchers. After establishing the current state of silence and gesture research, particularly with relevance to conversation analytic methodology, I discuss the challenge that non-vocal practices such as gestures pose for sequence organisation. Although the internal sequentiality of non-vocal practices (e.g., trajectory) has been an object of study with broadly applicable findings, little research has addressed the role of non-vocal practices within other sequential structures largely organised by talk.
[1] Introduction
Human behaviour involves a variety of practices that can be categorised as silence or sound, and the interpretation of sounds involving the voice has been the primary aim of linguistics and psychology of language. Non-vocal practices (themselves involving silence) such as gesture can occur during instances of vocal sound or silence. Silence and gesture have held important places in the social sciences and have been the subject of much research and debate. Of particular interest has been the extent to which differences and/or similarities exist across cultures and situations (e.g., Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006; Ekman & Keltner, 1997; Stivers et al., 2009; Gardner, Fitzgerald, & Mushin, 2009) and how observers can discern the ‘true’ intentions or emotions of people (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1969a; Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006; Scherer, Feldstein, Bond, & Rosenthal, 1985). Inter-species similarities in gesture use among primates has been growing as a subject of study over the past 20 years (e.g., Preuschoft & van Hooff, 1997; Suomi, 1997; Rossano, 2011) and is foundational to some areas of evolutionary psychology. I, however, restrict myself in this review to the interactional relevance of silence and non-vocal behaviour without accompanying utterances in human interactions. In doing so, I maintain a focus on how people actually use the interactional resources that are available to them – rather than how authors propose resources ought to be used or how people in laboratory settings perform or interpret practices.
Human behaviour develops and is governed by culture and situation, and issues such as personality or demographic statuses can become relevant in interaction as well. Before proceeding, a distinction between broad, cultural and specific, situational contexts must be made. By culture, most authors refer to participants’ ethnic backgrounds and countries of origin and by situation, the particular institutions or tasks in which participants are involved. However, as the strong traditions of ethnography and ethnomethodology that have developed over the past approximately 60 years has conveyed, cultures can differ between institutions or families as widely as they can between countries or ethnic groups. As Scheflen (1974, p. 97) notes, observing a person’s behaviour can help us identity their ‘origins and institutional experience’, which are not unidimensional. Two or more cultures can be present in the same situation for the same people. For example, interactions within a law firm in Uruguay would integrate both mainstream Uruguayan culture and mainstream legal culture in addition to possibly other cultures as well, e.g., the religious affiliation(s) of staff, a broader South American culture, and immigrant ethnic culture(s) of staff. Beyond larger group cultures, the firm would have its own organisational culture, and individual teams would have their own (Millward, 2005). For the most part, however, interactional linguistic and social psychological research has viewed the construct of culture as a product of general location (or country) and ethnicity and the practices of more specific settings or family units as situational, specialised, or idiosyncratic.
It is unlikely that a given practice, whether performed with the voice or with the body, can be invented by one person and remain in use solely by that particular person. Without spreading, even if only to a family unit or group of co-workers, such a practice would not be communicative. Communicative gestures, for example, activate mirror neurons, which contribute to our social-behavioural learning (e.g., Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). It is thus also unlikely that a particular practice of which interlocutors demonstrate understanding has not been performed by someone else in some form, or such a practice would not be understood. The tendency to label practices as idiosyncratic reflects ignorance of other cultures and subcultures (Scheflen, 1974, p. 101). Rather, ambiguity and meaning work against one another to balance communicative flexibility and precision. Scheflen (1974, p. 48) summarises the negative correlation of this relationship within Bateson’s (1972) theoretical framework, ‘meaning increases as ambiguity decreases, and ambiguity is decreased by the formation of larger and larger integrations of patterned behavior’. Implied in Scheflen’s description, however, is that the relationship is also a progressive one. The idea that there might be benefits to maintaining ambiguity or flexibility is lost. However, communicative flexibility can be very important to conveying meaning in different sequential environments (Berger & Rae, in press).
Gardner et al. (2009) also discuss how participants from the same country and ethnic background (Anglo-Australian) behave very differently in different interactional contexts (in this case, a political debate vs. relaxing at home). Gardner et al. thus reason that interactional differences are not ‘cultural’ per se but that an orientation to the goals of the interaction is pivotal in determining how interactants will behave. They propose that although differences in the extent to which particular types of practices (e.g., silence) may be seen across cultures, an underlying variable is how members of different cultures orient to the goals of both individual interactions and to social interaction more generally. In the case of silence, they propose that this is an orientation to, or lack of orientation to, pressure to ‘get things done’. This argument is supported by Berger (2011), who demonstrates a similar phenomenon in American data, as well as by Lehtonen & Sajavaara (1985), who explain the origins of norms favouring silence in Finnish language and culture as possibly originating from the solitude of Finnish rural life. The latter authors go on to critique the American-centric approach to spoken interaction, in which silence is comparatively uncommon and is viewed as a lack of action, as avoidance of silence rather than genuine exchange of information (cf. Tannen, 1985 on New York vs. Californian communication styles).
East and Southeast Asian societies likewise tend to view talk as something that should be done with adequate forethought and for the purpose of exchanging information (Saville-Troike, 1985). However, even in Western European and North American discourses, silence among intimates is viewed as an indication of ‘interpersonal rapport so great that people understand each other without putting their thoughts into words’ (Tannen, 1985), which Baker (1955) terms ‘positive silence’. This is in contrast to Goffman’s (1967, p. 36) observation that undue lulls are signs of having nothing in common or of having to think of things to say (a form of what Baker (1955) terms ‘negative silence’), raising the question of what is undue and how much silence constitutes a lull. Baker (1955, p. 160) conceptualises silence in interaction as an association between tension and silence, with negative silence involving complete tension and positive silence involving no tension. He presents this as association, rather than movement along a continuum. All silences fall somewhere between fully positive and fully negative, and the same silence can become a different kind of silence. Baker’s system looks at the immediate interactional context of the silence, and subsequent silences can have different levels of tension.
As Sapir (1949, p. 53) observes, we often form judgements of people based on what they do and do not say. Within the study of silence, orientations to positive and negative politeness[1] (Brown & Levinson, 1987; see also Goffman, 1955) exist such that sometimes silence is seen as the avoidance of negative face (i.e. not performing an impolite action) or as the expression of positive face (i.e. communicating ‘good listening skills’). Even when silence is viewed as problematic, violations of positive and negative politeness are at work. By being silent, one may be neglecting to perform a polite action or communicating negative attitudes such as disinterest. Situationally, the meanings of silence and gesture can vary across cultures, and there are two main approaches to this issue. The cataloguing approach of descriptive linguistics (e.g., Morris, 1994) is particularly popular with gestures, whilst applied work problematising misunderstanding between members of different cultures (e.g., Eades, 2000, 2007) is equally applicable across silence, gesture, and other non-vocal behaviour.
[1.1] What is Non-vocal?
Saville-Troike (1985) distinguishes between verbal and non-verbal codes and vocal and non-vocal channels, as shown in Table 1. This is a useful starting point and certainly captures a wide range of communicative resources. However, for the purposes of the current analysis, a simplified system must suffice, as non-vocal verbal communication such as written language and sign languages are not within the scope of this review. Rather, I will use verbal to refer to only spoken language unless otherwise specified, and vocal will be used to refer to both spoken language and non-verbal vocalisations such as ‘mm’ or ‘ah’. Non-vocal will refer to any bodily behaviour that does not use the voice (gesture, performance of tasks, scratches, grooming, and the like). Because these behaviours are not necessarily communicative, although they may well communicate in a given context, it is necessary to further specify a set of terms to designate function. I use behaviour irrespective of ‘channel’ or function in social interaction, practice to refer to behaviours that are interactively consequential, and resource to refer to behaviours or classes of behaviours that operate in a structurally regular way that can be drawn upon for effective communication.
Table 1. Codes and Channels, adapted from Saville-Troike’s (1985)
[2] Silence in Interaction
In minority world[2] communication and communication theories, silence is commonly considered to be an abstaining, inaction, or withholding – an absence of communication (Scollon, 1985). Silence can be the background against which talk is perceived (Tannen, 1985), but it can also have communicative functions of its own, as Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967, p. 48) argue: it is impossible for a person to not communicate. Some scholars take the position of silence as inaction a step further to ascribe personality characteristics to silence. Feldstein, Alberti, and BenDebba (1979, p. 85) group interactants into two styles based on self-report questionnaires and recorded interactions: those who are ‘talkative, cheerful, and cooperative’ and those who are ‘reserved, detached, and taciturn’. They thus neglect the possibility that a person can be cheerful but quiet or talkative but detached. This binary view of silence in human communication styles is not the case worldwide (Kim, 2002, Chapter 13). More troubling, however, is that Feldstein et al. (1979) take these characteristics as causative of silence and describe people who are more prone to silence as ‘cold, suspicious, insecure, and tense’. Silence that occurs in the presence of two or more people (whether they are physically present or communicating through mediated systems) can mean nothing at all or it can mean more than one can communicate effectively using words. Silence inherently comes about as a result of nobody speaking and therefore everybody engaging in silence – what McDermott and Tylbor (1983) term collusion.
Despite collusion, silence in interaction is often attributable to a particular party or parties, making a verbal response relevantly absent (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). However, silence does not always simply mean absence. Although a response might be absent, the silence creates anticipation in parties who were not implicated in responding that can lead to additional, intervening talk or more attentive postures. Even when ‘nothing’ is happening, the implicated party can be doing doing nothing through their silence. Silence is performative and communicative in sometimes subtle ways. In co-present interaction, silence is inevitably accompanied by non-vocal behaviour, even if that behaviour is to remain still. By adopting a posture, one communicates ‘doing nothing’, ‘thinking’, etc. through one’s silence. Alternatively, interlocutors can produce a range of gestures with vague to precise meanings. All of these behaviours provide the context for others to understand the attributable silence, whereas silence on a telephone call might prompt one party to check whether the other is still on the line.
This is not to say that silence on the telephone does not convey meaning, only that one resource for avoiding conflict or saving face in such a situation is precisely the lack of additional information ordinarily provided in co-present interactions. That is, facial expressions and postures cannot ‘give away’ the meaning of the silence over the telephone, and thus one can assume silence to be performing positive functions, such as ‘good listening’, more readily. Steiner (1967, cited in Johannesen, 1974) offers a useful distinction, that silence is primarily non-verbalisation rather than non-symbolisation. Braithwaite (1990) and Samarin (1965, p. 115) argue that silence is indeed a symbolic resource in itself, not simply the absence of action or behaviour. Not only is silence potentially meaningful, but it is also potentially not meaningful (i.e. inconsequential or not indicative of negativity). Despite the possibility of meaningful, responsive behaviour occurring during silence, these actions and the silence containing them have largely been outside the remit of traditional linguistic approaches. Saville-Troike (1985) calls for an integrated theory of communication that addresses the performative and communicative properties of silence, gesture, and language.
[2.1] Contextual Considerations
As Gardner et al. (2009) discuss, silence can vary across cultures, but this does not necessarily mean that cultures value silence differently in the grand scheme of things. It is possible, rather, that they have different orientations to interactions that are manifested in different degrees of silence. Stivers et al. (2009) looked at silences between yes/no interrogatives and responses; the ten languages that they studied show similar distributions for most of the languages but with significant differences in the means. Stivers et al. propose that speakers of different languages have different calibrations of silence. Allwood (n.d., cited in Lehtonen & Sajavaara, 1985) hypothesises that cultures that have less tolerance for overlap have greater tolerance for silence and that cultures that have more tolerance for overlap have less tolerance for silence. This might be further dependent on sequential position, but preliminary evidence suggests that this is a reasonable hypothesis (Lehtonen & Sajavaara, 1985; Tannen, 1985).
However, this might not always be the case when further constraints on response timing are in effect. Nevile (2007) found that air crew members for major international airlines and air traffic controllers tended not to have silences at the boundaries of turns nor overlapping speech at any point in their interactions. Nevile (2006) also found that when precision timing does not occur between air crew and air traffic controllers, it is a possible sign that communication is impaired and that they may not be working together safely. In other words, ‘common but brief’ overlap (Sacks et al., 1974) that is observed in ordinary conversation was not only not observed but was extremely problematic for air crew and air traffic controllers. Although overlap was particularly indicative of problematic interaction, silence can lead to overlap. Silence can occasion participants beginning turns-at-talk, whether the turn is the sequentially implicated responsive action, a new initiating action, a repeat of the prior action, or pursuit of a preferred response. With all of these options available, participants sometimes begin speaking simultaneously following silence. Participants may begin speaking simultaneously due to possible problems with the preceding utterance[3], for example, or because once silence sets in there is a lack of clarity when and who will (or ought to) speak next. In ordinary conversation and most institutions, however, silence and overlap do not tend to have such extreme consequences that interactional difficulties in aviation can have.
Although psychotherapy is a type of interaction that is structured through talk (Philips, 1985), psychotherapy is a situation in which one might expect considerable silences as a matter of course, rather than as a sign of trouble. However, little empirical research has looked at silence in psychotherapeutic or counselling contexts. Most publications dealing with silence in psychotherapy are written from prescriptive, theoretical positions by practitioners who are writing from their own interpretations of their own practice (e.g., Prince, 1997). Many of these are written from a psychoanalytic perspective in which the therapist is taught to allow silence to occur despite interactional relevance of therapist speech (e.g., Prince, 1997). In psychoanalysis, silence is taken to be meaningful and attributable to the client except when the psychoanalyst deems the client ready to receive an interpretation (Haim, 1990). Attributions of the meaning of the silence can purportedly be made from how the psychoanalyst feels about the silence her- or himself (Blos, 1972). Fliess (1949) argues that silence can be viewed as a form of sphincter closure to cause retention (of words, substituting for excretory products) and to punish the psychoanalyst in an act of transference of feelings about a dominant, cold parent to the psychoanalyst. In 1961, the idea that silence was a sign of aggression on the part of the client had remained salient to psychoanalysis. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a special issue in this year on silence as a form of acting out (cited in Ephratt, 2008).
In other therapeutic approaches represented by writings on silence (e.g., crisis intervention, Scott & Lester, 1998; cf. Prince, 1997 from a psychoanalytic perspective), practitioners also express a struggle between silence and talk. Although authors that belong to other therapeutic camps do not tend to view silence as ‘urethral-erotic’, ‘anal-erotic’, or ‘oral-erotic’, as Fliess (1949) does, ‘resistance’ is a common theme, as is therapists’ discomfort with silence versus allowing opportunities for clients to speak. The conflicts expressed by these therapists over silence in their practice may not reflect how naturally occurring silence in psychotherapeutic contexts is treated by clients. In fact, silence can be a resource for communicating certain elements of an issue that are not easily verbalised (e.g., that a topic is sensitive) or for which verbalisation would call into question the veracity of the statement itself (e.g., that one is sincere).
Silverman and Peräkylä (1990; see also Silverman, 1996, pp. 63-88) found that both patients and HIV counsellors used silence as one way to mark topics as sensitive. They describe this as ‘hesitation’, which includes perturbations such as ‘um’. The key point for them is that the substantive talk is being delayed. In other words, participants were actively but momentarily avoiding discussing or mentioning topics that were delicate, often involving sexual partners, sexual activities, or health statuses. Berger (forthcoming) examines psychotherapy interactions and demonstrates that silence can contribute to the performance of sincerity. When responding to the therapist’s initiating actions, silences are used to demonstrate clients’ thoughtfulness or sincerity, and quick responses are treated as challenging and/or insincere.
[2.2] Conversation Analysis and Silence
Stivers & Rossano (2010a) critique the treatment of talk-focused interactions as a point of reference, noting that most of day to day human interaction does not involve long stretches of talk. Rather, talk is something that occurs when interactants need or want to convey particular information. This information may be of practical or theoretical importance to the participants, or it may be ‘small talk’ for the sole purpose of social bonding. Silence outside of talk-based interactions is inherently unproblematic until attempts to engage in talk-based interaction fail. Silence within talk-based interactions, on the other hand, has been a subject of study per se within social research. Kincaid (1979) points out on the other hand that epistemological biases toward discrete messages (i.e. talk) has hindered our understanding of the role of silence in social interaction. In some contexts, silence may even be more acceptable than talk (Ishii and Bruneau, 1988; Murphy, 1970; Johannesen, 1974) in terms of an overall approach to interaction, a fact that is largely ignored by minority world scholars except to the extent that ‘other cultures’ can be compared to mainstream American and Western European cultures. The meaning for participants of a particular silence is evident in how they treat it interactionally and the sequential environment in which it is situated. Alternatively, silence can have no particular meaning in the interactional context in which is occurs (Berger, 2011). We must be careful to analyse silence according to how it is used and treated by interactants themselves.
Silence has been an issue for CA since the early years of its development with regard to turn-taking and preference organisation. In Sacks et al.’s (1974) paper on turn-taking for conversation, different functions and meanings of silences are discussed in depth. The sequential position of a particular silence can tell interlocutors and analysts whether a response, for example, is relevantly absent and which party or parties ‘should’ be speaking. A silence following an initiating action also signals that a dispreferred response may be forthcoming. In order to obtain a preferred response after a silence has begun, the speaker of the initiating action may rephrase the initiating action, produce a slightly different action (e.g., suggesting seeing a film instead of having dinner), or produce an alternative action designed such that the same response is preferred according to the alternative action’s format (e.g., suggesting that a person might have class that night). Note that ‘dispreferred’ refers to actions that are interactionally sensitive, for example a refusal, but not necessarily what the speaker of the initiating action wants or does not want. A person can invite another to a party but not really want them to accept (and the invitee can know that it is an insincere invitation). However, a quick, unmitigated refusal would appear ungrateful and abrupt despite being what the inviter actually wants. By constructing the refusal as regretful, both parties are able to maintain politeness. With regard to the timing of silences, Jefferson (1988) suggests one second as an approximate ‘standard maximum’ for silence in conversation. However, as Gardner et al. (2009), Stivers et al. (2009), and Berger (2011) demonstrate, one second is not a universal maximum, even in English.
[3] Gesture Research
Non-vocal behaviour can occur with or without accompanying talk, that is, without or with silence, respectively, and meanings may vary according to whether it is done silently. Research involving non-vocal behaviour without accompanying talk has focused on gestures (rather than, say, accomplishing tasks). The meanings of gestures can vary across and within cultures (i.e. across sub-cultures), and their placements and use by interactants are diverse and multi-faceted. Even so-called universal (Ekman & Keltner, 1997) gestures such as smiling can be performed very differently in different cultures (Pike, 1982, p. 51), including in different cultures of non-human primates (Preuschoft & van Hooff, 1997). Although humans may have the same vocal and non-vocal resources available, how they are organised and utilised in different languages and cultures varies (Sapir, 1925; Hall, 1969; Birdwhistell, 1968). Because gestures, like languages, comprise such a wide and multi-faceted area of enquiry, it is impossible to provide an exhaustive account of gestures and gesture research in the limited space available, even for English-speaking countries alone. In this section I will give a brief history of gesture research, not limited to stand-alone gestures but without an exhaustive account of gesture in human and non-human interaction. This section aims to orient the reader not only to current directions in interactional gesture research but that which underpins it as well.
[3.1] Early Gesture Research
Early gesture research focused on their use in rhetoric with a focus on prescription for successful oratory (e.g., Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria) in relation to thematic aspects of gestures’ relationships to the ongoing talk. For many centuries, this approach dominated writings on gesture, and Bary (1679, cited in Kendon, 2004) produced a vocabulary of arm and hand gestures and body postures based on prescribed interactional meanings of the gestures rather than relationships with talk (e.g., frankness, tenderness, complaining). This approach continued into the 18th century, although it is in sharp contrast with current approaches to gesture. Engel (1785) returned in some ways to earlier systems by beginning his system with a distinction between body movements that originate from bodily states and those that are related to emotion and purposeful activity. The latter category is further divided into categories based on function, which are each also divided into either precursors to intentional activities or figurative gestures.
Austin (1806) based his classification system on Engel’s and deals extensively with hand gestures. Like classical writers on gesture, his primary focus was on gestures for orators. He looks at gesture from four viewpoints: the instrument (e.g., hand, head), signification (i.e. meaning), quality (e.g., boldness, simplicity), and style of delivery (i.e. the overall style including talk and its effects on the qualities of gestures). Most relevant to our analysis is the viewpoint of significance, which is divided into significant and non-significant gestures. Non-significant gestures are those that ‘do not mark any particular sentiment; but are rather used to denote a sort of general relation in the expressions, and derive their significance from the time and manner of their application, from the place in which they are used, and from their various combinations’, whereas significant gestures are those that are substantively communicative. Significant and non-significant gestures are then further subdivided similarly to Engel on a functional basis.
[3.2] Interactional Research
Unlike previous writers on gesture, Wundt (1921, cited in Kendon, 2004) deals exclusively with gestures that can occur without accompanying talk. His system of hand gestures describes such gestures in terms of their symbolic function and their physical implementation (or form). Wundt’s move away from oratory marks a beginning in the movement toward an interactional focus in gesture research. Although some authors today have specifically focused on the semiotics of gesture (e.g., Morris, 1994; Calbris, 1990), the majority of gesture research today is experimental or interactional in nature.
Efron’s (1941/1972) study of Eastern European Jewish and Southern Italian communities in New York City was perhaps the first truly interactional study of gesture and remains a key influential study in the field. Efron’s aim was to systemically examine the gestures of first generation immigrants and assimilated descendants of both groups. He noted similarities between the gestures of the assimilated descendants and showed that gestures are cultural rather than genetic. This finding refuted nazi propaganda at the time that claimed that gestural styles were racially inherited. Although Efron’s focus was on the similarities and differences of gestures across and within cultures, he deals with gesture from three viewpoints that contribute to a typology of gesture: spatio-temporal, inter-locutional, and linguistic. The most widely known of these perspectives is the linguistic, within which famous categories such as ‘emblem’ are described.
Ekman and Friesen (1969b) offer a categorical system of gestures, some of which are based on Efron’s. Their paper represents one of the formative works in ‘nonverbal behavior’ and ‘nonverbal communication’, and their work increasingly became concerned with detecting deception (e.g., 1969a). These pieces of research were of special interest to psychiatrists, and Ekman and Friesen’s (1969b) system received a wide and supportive audience due to its well-articulated structure during the early days of this area of enquiry (Kendon, 2004, p. 95). Their system accounts for a broad range of body movements and is arranged around three perspectives: usage, origin, and coding. Gestures may belong to multiple categories within each area. For example, they provide a Venn diagram (ibid. p. 57) demonstrating how interactive, idiosyncratic, communicative, and informative categories can apply to the same behaviours. Ekman and Friesen recognised that behaviour may be intentional or unintentional and may have shared or individual meanings; they also recognised ways in which in the transmission of that meaning may function interactionally. They present five categories of ‘nonverbal behavior’ (emblems, illustrators, affect displays, regulators, and adaptors) as a work in progress that is not intended to be an exhaustive list nor exclusive categories but to build on the work of Efron with a view toward evolving specification.
Another influential perspective on gesture research is that of Ray L. Birdwhistell. Birdwhistell is famous for his framework of kinesics, which began with the application of a structural linguistics system onto non-vocal behaviour. The system he proposed borrowed terminology from structural linguistics to create concepts such as the kine and kineme (after concepts such as phone and phoneme). Unfortunately, because Birdwhistell was most concerned with teaching and avoided published anything he did not consider perfect, little work has been done in the field of kinesics (Kendon & Sigman, 1996). His ideas, have, however, stimulated the field of gesture studies. Adopting a structural linguistic framework in the development of kinesics was not a prescriptive approach but simply a starting point. Birdwhistell was concerned with the whole of co-present social interaction and saw it as a patterned system that could be analysed. This approach later became known as ‘context analysis’ (Scheflen, 1963, 1973).
Compared to more category-rich systems of gesture research, context analysis looks at the whole of an interaction, of which non-vocal behaviour is one part. Scheflen is one of the few who have employed kinesics as a methodology, and it is thoroughly incorporated into Scheflen’s version of context analysis. Context analysis has been described by Kendon and Sigman (1996) as a methodology ‘in which patterns of behavior in interaction are described and interpreted in terms of the contexts in which they occur’ and which are ‘aimed at systematic description of the total organization of behavior in interaction’ as opposed to those that study components of interaction in isolation from their situated use.
This definition of context analysis is more in line with Birdwhistell’s theoretical approach to interaction than how kinesics was and continues to be taken up by popular culture, academics, and practitioners alike – as ‘body language’. Although Birdwhistell approached non-vocal behaviour from a structural linguistics framework, he never intended that it would be considered language but rather a part of a cohesive whole that is human interaction (Kendon & Sigman, 1996, p. 245). ‘Body language’ is a misnomer that implies that non-vocal behaviours have specific meanings and are produced in syntactically appropriate ways to communicate consciously. Although the structural linguistics-based framework of kinesics is such that non-vocal behaviours may be combined to form complex kinemorphs that are equivalent to words or ideas, non-vocal behaviours are not placed such that a grammar or syntax per se exists outside of sign languages. However, non-vocal behaviours can stand in syntactic places that are structured by talk. Pike (1954/1967) describes a common party game at the time in which participants gradually replace words with signs that visually represent the words being replaced. He uses this example to illustrate how inattention to non-vocal behaviour (and in this case, specifically non-vocal practices, a term I use to describe those behaviours that perform specific interactional functions but which may or may not be gestures) can lead to misinterpretation of spoken language.
Pike’s major work Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior was written in three volumes and published between 1954 and 1960 with an updated second edition in 1967. It covers a range of linguistic issues including non-vocal behaviour. Although Pike primarily studied the languages of indigenous societies (drawing heavily on his teacher Edward Sapir), and devotes much of volumes two and three to this endeavour, the first volume of this work covers more general linguistic issues. Volume one deals with most of the issues that are directly relevant to non-vocal behaviour as an area of study. It is also in this volume that he coins the terms etic and emic. Etic refers to perspectives or analyses that are intended to treat all groups equally and is characterised as generated from an outsider’s perspective. It is sometimes described as objective, as Pike himself on occasion does in his description of it. However, Pike’s use of ‘objective’ does not imply a realist or empiricist objectivity. Rather, Pike’s notion of objectivity is simply that of an outsider’s judgement along with all of the values and experience that that outsider might bring. Multiple researchers may describe the same phenomena differently yet all come from an etic position. Emic, on the other hand, describes perspectives or analyses that reflect what is meaningful to participants, rather than based on the outsider’s perspective. Although an outsider may describe a phenomenon, they may do so from an emic perspective by finding out what is meaningful to those involved. Etic and emic do not represent discrete categories of descriptions but rather are two extremes on a continuum. Pike states that when a person first approaches a group with whom they have not had contact before, they will always have an etic perspective. As they become more familiar with the values and practices of the group, they will develop an emic perspective.
Pike’s concepts of etic and emic are useful for the understanding of conversation analytic approaches. A key feature of CA is that it is able to describe both structural regularity across cases (i.e. an etic perspective) as well as how individual parties in particular interactions orient to structures and interactional resources (i.e. an emic perspective). CA strives to marry these two perspectives to achieve a multi-level description of social interaction (Schegloff, 1987). Although CA’s methodology is based primarily in talk, the flexibility of CA in examining particular interactions and corpora has relevance for the study of non-vocal behaviour. As I have mentioned above, the meanings and use of non-vocal behaviour are dependent on a variety of factors such as the immediate sequential environment and the broader cultures to which the interactants and setting belong. Both issues must be considered in the interpretation of individual instances. However, the broader structural features of interaction are often quite regular across participants and situations. In discussing individual cases, analysts are able to demonstrate how a practice can be used by interactants as well as some of the effects that conversational organisations have on interactants’ actions (Schegloff, 1987).
Whilst many interactionally based researchers take the perspective that interaction must be studied as a whole (e.g., Pike, 1967), some take a more language-focused approach to gesture. McNeill (1985, p. 350) makes the (perhaps still) cutting edge statement that the designation of ‘linguistic’ as what we can write down and non-linguistic as everything else ‘is a cultural artefact and an arbitrary limitation derived from a particular historical evolution.’ This is in itself a bold statement against ethnocentrism and ableism for his time. McNeill, in proposing a new way to view the study of gesture, asks us to question conventional minority world linguistics and psychology of language assumptions. He goes on to provide an account of why, in his view, gesture is verbal.
McNeill presents a revolutionary and radical approach for the time in which So You Think Gestures Are Nonverbal? was written. He argues that gestures, including ‘referential’ and ‘discourse-oriented’, are ‘verbal’, because ‘(a) Gestures occur only during speech, (b) they have semantic and pragmatic functions that parallel those of speech, (c) they are synchronized with linguistic units in speech, (d) they dissolve together with speech in aphasia, and (e) they develop together with speech in children’ (ibid. p. 353). These claims are, however, weakened by a number of pieces of evidence:
(a) He claims that gestures only occur during speech production (ibid. p. 353), despite also claiming that ‘more than 90%’ occur during speech production (i.e. that approximately 10% of gestures do not occur during speech production) (ibid. p. 354).
(b & c) Whilst he makes a strong case that certain gestural patterns are associated with and usually synchronised with speech production (ibid. p. 354-361), he provides no evidence that they are necessarily or inherently intertwined (but see later work on the link between speech production and spontaneous gesture, such as Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2001).
(d) He lumps aphasias into one broad category (ibid. p. 361-362), whilst clinical and experimental evidence shows strong differences between types of aphasia and their effects on gesture and speech (See Feyereisen, 1987 for a specific critique of McNeill’s treatment of aphasia). Moreover, recent cognitive neurolinguistics research has shown that people do not have uniform neural pathways for language and information (Łojek, 2009). The elaborate use of gesture by people with aphasia (e.g., Goodwin, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2011) also suggests that at least referential gestures may in fact increase with aphasia, as people try to find other ways to communicate.
(e) While he reviews the literature on gesture and language development in children more thoroughly than aphasia, there is no clear indication that gesture and language develop synchronically in children, but rather that physical play may be a precursor to gesture and not necessarily to language (ibid. p. 362-365). The youngest gesturer they recorded was 5 years old, far older than a child who can be expected to use language. See Butterworth & Hadar (1989) for a thorough critique of McNeill’s assumptions regarding language development.
One of the most common aspects of modern gesture research is the recognition that communication is not merely a product of multiple parallel channels providing different information. Rather, information is communicated as a combination of different kinds of resources and modalities that moderate one another. This is particularly evident in the work of Birdwhistell and Pike, but prominent gesture researchers such as Kendon (1995) continue to address this issue. Kendon takes a broad, social psychological approach to gesture research and displays a tendency to examine particular gestures or classes of gestures in how they are used in social interaction (e.g., Kendon, 2002). Kendon’s interactional focus in his empirical work parallels that of conversation analysis in some ways, such as the use of detailed transcripts to illustrate phenomena and a sequential orientation to some problems. Kendon’s work is variably concerned with conversational structures (e.g., Kendon, 1997, p. 114), interactional frameworks (e.g., Kendon, 1988a), and semiotics of gesture (e.g., Kendon, 2002).
[3.3] Conversation Analysis and Gesture
CA began through the study of telephone calls and audio-recorded co-present interactions. Focus on talk in the early days of CA helped to make the actions performed by parties explicit. However, both Goffman and Garfinkel, who influenced the development of CA in substantive ways, were concerned with broader issues such as how people engage with one another (e.g., Goffman, 1967) and how social institutions are constituted by the people within and interacting with them (e.g., Garfinkel, 1967). Nevertheless, most research within a CA framework on non-vocal practices has focused on gestures that occur with accompanying talk. Whether the (continued) focus on talk developed from engagement with the opportunities afforded by the data available at the time or whether it started with a talk-focused ideology cannot be answered conclusively. However, the ideology does not have to remain. The focus on action formation that underpinned early sequence organisational studies is a useful way to approach gestures and other non-vocal practices. By having an existing body of research on how talk is structured, the task of studying non-vocal practices becomes simplified. Because non-vocal practices do not usually constitute the whole of an interaction, their functions in alternation with and alongside talk become visible through their sequential positions, originally identified through work on talk.
The research of Jürgen Streeck and Charles and Marjorie Goodwin has been particularly influential in conversation analytic work on non-vocal behaviour. Streeck’s approach is cross-cultural and deals primarily with speakers’ hand gestures in co-present interactions with adults who do not have communication difficulties (e.g., Streeck, 2009a). Charles Goodwin’s work on non-vocal behaviour concentrates on the communicative resources available to people with aphasia (e.g., Goodwin, 2004), and Marjorie Goodwin’s work has focused on the communicative resources of children (e.g., Goodwin, Goodwin, & Yaeger-Dror, 2002). Research on gestures and other non-vocal practices from a CA perspective has, as mentioned previously, concentrated on how non-vocal practices facilitate or enhance talk.
Lerner, Zimmerman, and Kidwell (2011) have, conversely, identified task structures as an area of sequentiality to which even very young children orient. Lerner et al.’s analysis is built primarily around the example of a mother and small children preparing for lunch. They demonstrate how the participants orient to phases of the task and sequentiality of actions within the task in designing turns-at-talk and performing non-vocal behaviours. In their words, the ‘episodic and formal phase structure’ is a ‘resource for action’. Lerner et al.’s findings both enhance and challenge conversation analytic thought on non-vocal practices. Non-vocal practices (particularly tasks) can themselves be sequentially structured resources. In Lerner et al.’s data, non-vocal practices function somewhat external to the organisation of talk, but the process of preparing for a meal is an interaction that is structured through silence (Philips, 1985). Although their analysis lends support for viewing non-vocal practices as sequential resources, they do not definitively address tasks within what conversation analysts commonly know as sequences, that is, actions built around pairs of actions and expansions upon them.
Sacks and Schegloff (2002; cf. McNeill, 1992, p. 83) describe the internal phases of gestures that occur concurrently with talk and show how gestures reach an apex before returning to ‘home position’. The interactional relevance of this structure has been further discussed by Cibulka (2012), who shows that gestures can have multiple home positions at points along the way and that these intermediate home positions function differently from the initial home position. The intermediate home positions maintain engagement and readiness to respond, whilst the returning to the initial home position indicates completeness or withdrawal. As with Lerner et al.’s (2011) work, Sacks and Schegloff (2002) and Cibulka (2012) address structural concerns that do not map directly onto the sequential structure of conversations but which indicate that some level of sequentiality is at play.
Individual non-vocal resources have been described in terms of their sequential positions within interactions that are structured through talk. For example, gestures that are performed by one party and are then repeated by another party during a subsequent turn-at-talk (‘return gestures’, de Fornel, 1992; Koschmann and LeBaron, 2002, p. 262) are used to display intersubjectivity. Interrelated vocal and non-vocal practices can be used by participants in alternation with each other within the same turn-at-talk as well. Olsher (2004) describes how actions begun by talk can be completed by gestures. Little research has examined the functions of non-vocal practices that constitute entire actions, however Seo and Koshik (2010) and Mortensen (2012) have identified a small number of gestures that function as repair/correction initiators and regularly receive verbal responses in foreign language classrooms. Additionally, Whitehead (2011) has described variations on nodding that are used by the speaker of an initiating action following a response. Although specific non-vocal resources with apparent sequential positions and that have implications for the ongoing interaction have been identified, the broader role of non-vocal practices within sequence organisation remains unexamined.
[4] Conclusion
Although silence is often perceived in minority world cultures as inaction or inactivity, people may perform many communicative activities during or through silence. These activities can emphasise ‘doing nothing’, or although the interactant is not progressing the interaction verbally, something else is relevantly occurring (e.g., ‘doing thinking’ or non-vocal reactions). If they are in fact doing something, to quote Sacks and Schegloff (1973), ‘why that now?’ Although the structural organisation of non-vocal practices has been addressed in terms of socially relevant internal sequences, the sequential role of non-vocal practices within interactions that are structured through talk has only been examined in terms of particular practices. How, then, do non-vocal practices function within sequences? In order to understand the role of non-vocal practices such as gesture, we must first understand how silence, which has traditionally been conceptualised as occupying sequential space as the absence of talk, is treated by participants. In other words, how does silence function within the sequential environment in relation to other activities? How does context affect silence and non-vocal practices? If one organisation (or aspect of an organisation) is affected, are all organisations (or aspects of that organisation) affected? These questions must be answered in order to develop a comprehensive approach to co-present interaction.
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[1] Although Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory and Goffman’s (1955) concept of face cannot be applied to all cultures (e.g., Matsumoto, 1988; Ide, 1989), they have a degree of usefulness in relation to our current discussion of silence.
[2] Minority world refers to the approximately 17% of the world that is commonly called ‘western’ or ‘developed’ in contrast to majority world, which refers to the approximately 83% of the world that is often called ‘developing’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘third world’, etc. Majority world also includes indigenous societies within geopolitical borders that are claimed by minority world states (Alam, 2007).
[3] This is true at least in minority world conversations. Philips (1976, p. 88) notes that people of the Warm Springs Nation rarely begin speaking simultaneously despite frequent long silences.
Israel Berger
University of Roehampton
E-mail: [email protected]
Although meaningful actions may be present during silence, particularly in the form of gesture, these actions have not been within the remit of traditional approaches to linguistics. In this review, I provide a historical account of key research and theories concerning silence and gesture and their relevance to interactional researchers. After establishing the current state of silence and gesture research, particularly with relevance to conversation analytic methodology, I discuss the challenge that non-vocal practices such as gestures pose for sequence organisation. Although the internal sequentiality of non-vocal practices (e.g., trajectory) has been an object of study with broadly applicable findings, little research has addressed the role of non-vocal practices within other sequential structures largely organised by talk.
[1] Introduction
Human behaviour involves a variety of practices that can be categorised as silence or sound, and the interpretation of sounds involving the voice has been the primary aim of linguistics and psychology of language. Non-vocal practices (themselves involving silence) such as gesture can occur during instances of vocal sound or silence. Silence and gesture have held important places in the social sciences and have been the subject of much research and debate. Of particular interest has been the extent to which differences and/or similarities exist across cultures and situations (e.g., Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006; Ekman & Keltner, 1997; Stivers et al., 2009; Gardner, Fitzgerald, & Mushin, 2009) and how observers can discern the ‘true’ intentions or emotions of people (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1969a; Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006; Scherer, Feldstein, Bond, & Rosenthal, 1985). Inter-species similarities in gesture use among primates has been growing as a subject of study over the past 20 years (e.g., Preuschoft & van Hooff, 1997; Suomi, 1997; Rossano, 2011) and is foundational to some areas of evolutionary psychology. I, however, restrict myself in this review to the interactional relevance of silence and non-vocal behaviour without accompanying utterances in human interactions. In doing so, I maintain a focus on how people actually use the interactional resources that are available to them – rather than how authors propose resources ought to be used or how people in laboratory settings perform or interpret practices.
Human behaviour develops and is governed by culture and situation, and issues such as personality or demographic statuses can become relevant in interaction as well. Before proceeding, a distinction between broad, cultural and specific, situational contexts must be made. By culture, most authors refer to participants’ ethnic backgrounds and countries of origin and by situation, the particular institutions or tasks in which participants are involved. However, as the strong traditions of ethnography and ethnomethodology that have developed over the past approximately 60 years has conveyed, cultures can differ between institutions or families as widely as they can between countries or ethnic groups. As Scheflen (1974, p. 97) notes, observing a person’s behaviour can help us identity their ‘origins and institutional experience’, which are not unidimensional. Two or more cultures can be present in the same situation for the same people. For example, interactions within a law firm in Uruguay would integrate both mainstream Uruguayan culture and mainstream legal culture in addition to possibly other cultures as well, e.g., the religious affiliation(s) of staff, a broader South American culture, and immigrant ethnic culture(s) of staff. Beyond larger group cultures, the firm would have its own organisational culture, and individual teams would have their own (Millward, 2005). For the most part, however, interactional linguistic and social psychological research has viewed the construct of culture as a product of general location (or country) and ethnicity and the practices of more specific settings or family units as situational, specialised, or idiosyncratic.
It is unlikely that a given practice, whether performed with the voice or with the body, can be invented by one person and remain in use solely by that particular person. Without spreading, even if only to a family unit or group of co-workers, such a practice would not be communicative. Communicative gestures, for example, activate mirror neurons, which contribute to our social-behavioural learning (e.g., Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). It is thus also unlikely that a particular practice of which interlocutors demonstrate understanding has not been performed by someone else in some form, or such a practice would not be understood. The tendency to label practices as idiosyncratic reflects ignorance of other cultures and subcultures (Scheflen, 1974, p. 101). Rather, ambiguity and meaning work against one another to balance communicative flexibility and precision. Scheflen (1974, p. 48) summarises the negative correlation of this relationship within Bateson’s (1972) theoretical framework, ‘meaning increases as ambiguity decreases, and ambiguity is decreased by the formation of larger and larger integrations of patterned behavior’. Implied in Scheflen’s description, however, is that the relationship is also a progressive one. The idea that there might be benefits to maintaining ambiguity or flexibility is lost. However, communicative flexibility can be very important to conveying meaning in different sequential environments (Berger & Rae, in press).
Gardner et al. (2009) also discuss how participants from the same country and ethnic background (Anglo-Australian) behave very differently in different interactional contexts (in this case, a political debate vs. relaxing at home). Gardner et al. thus reason that interactional differences are not ‘cultural’ per se but that an orientation to the goals of the interaction is pivotal in determining how interactants will behave. They propose that although differences in the extent to which particular types of practices (e.g., silence) may be seen across cultures, an underlying variable is how members of different cultures orient to the goals of both individual interactions and to social interaction more generally. In the case of silence, they propose that this is an orientation to, or lack of orientation to, pressure to ‘get things done’. This argument is supported by Berger (2011), who demonstrates a similar phenomenon in American data, as well as by Lehtonen & Sajavaara (1985), who explain the origins of norms favouring silence in Finnish language and culture as possibly originating from the solitude of Finnish rural life. The latter authors go on to critique the American-centric approach to spoken interaction, in which silence is comparatively uncommon and is viewed as a lack of action, as avoidance of silence rather than genuine exchange of information (cf. Tannen, 1985 on New York vs. Californian communication styles).
East and Southeast Asian societies likewise tend to view talk as something that should be done with adequate forethought and for the purpose of exchanging information (Saville-Troike, 1985). However, even in Western European and North American discourses, silence among intimates is viewed as an indication of ‘interpersonal rapport so great that people understand each other without putting their thoughts into words’ (Tannen, 1985), which Baker (1955) terms ‘positive silence’. This is in contrast to Goffman’s (1967, p. 36) observation that undue lulls are signs of having nothing in common or of having to think of things to say (a form of what Baker (1955) terms ‘negative silence’), raising the question of what is undue and how much silence constitutes a lull. Baker (1955, p. 160) conceptualises silence in interaction as an association between tension and silence, with negative silence involving complete tension and positive silence involving no tension. He presents this as association, rather than movement along a continuum. All silences fall somewhere between fully positive and fully negative, and the same silence can become a different kind of silence. Baker’s system looks at the immediate interactional context of the silence, and subsequent silences can have different levels of tension.
As Sapir (1949, p. 53) observes, we often form judgements of people based on what they do and do not say. Within the study of silence, orientations to positive and negative politeness[1] (Brown & Levinson, 1987; see also Goffman, 1955) exist such that sometimes silence is seen as the avoidance of negative face (i.e. not performing an impolite action) or as the expression of positive face (i.e. communicating ‘good listening skills’). Even when silence is viewed as problematic, violations of positive and negative politeness are at work. By being silent, one may be neglecting to perform a polite action or communicating negative attitudes such as disinterest. Situationally, the meanings of silence and gesture can vary across cultures, and there are two main approaches to this issue. The cataloguing approach of descriptive linguistics (e.g., Morris, 1994) is particularly popular with gestures, whilst applied work problematising misunderstanding between members of different cultures (e.g., Eades, 2000, 2007) is equally applicable across silence, gesture, and other non-vocal behaviour.
[1.1] What is Non-vocal?
Saville-Troike (1985) distinguishes between verbal and non-verbal codes and vocal and non-vocal channels, as shown in Table 1. This is a useful starting point and certainly captures a wide range of communicative resources. However, for the purposes of the current analysis, a simplified system must suffice, as non-vocal verbal communication such as written language and sign languages are not within the scope of this review. Rather, I will use verbal to refer to only spoken language unless otherwise specified, and vocal will be used to refer to both spoken language and non-verbal vocalisations such as ‘mm’ or ‘ah’. Non-vocal will refer to any bodily behaviour that does not use the voice (gesture, performance of tasks, scratches, grooming, and the like). Because these behaviours are not necessarily communicative, although they may well communicate in a given context, it is necessary to further specify a set of terms to designate function. I use behaviour irrespective of ‘channel’ or function in social interaction, practice to refer to behaviours that are interactively consequential, and resource to refer to behaviours or classes of behaviours that operate in a structurally regular way that can be drawn upon for effective communication.
Table 1. Codes and Channels, adapted from Saville-Troike’s (1985)
[2] Silence in Interaction
In minority world[2] communication and communication theories, silence is commonly considered to be an abstaining, inaction, or withholding – an absence of communication (Scollon, 1985). Silence can be the background against which talk is perceived (Tannen, 1985), but it can also have communicative functions of its own, as Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967, p. 48) argue: it is impossible for a person to not communicate. Some scholars take the position of silence as inaction a step further to ascribe personality characteristics to silence. Feldstein, Alberti, and BenDebba (1979, p. 85) group interactants into two styles based on self-report questionnaires and recorded interactions: those who are ‘talkative, cheerful, and cooperative’ and those who are ‘reserved, detached, and taciturn’. They thus neglect the possibility that a person can be cheerful but quiet or talkative but detached. This binary view of silence in human communication styles is not the case worldwide (Kim, 2002, Chapter 13). More troubling, however, is that Feldstein et al. (1979) take these characteristics as causative of silence and describe people who are more prone to silence as ‘cold, suspicious, insecure, and tense’. Silence that occurs in the presence of two or more people (whether they are physically present or communicating through mediated systems) can mean nothing at all or it can mean more than one can communicate effectively using words. Silence inherently comes about as a result of nobody speaking and therefore everybody engaging in silence – what McDermott and Tylbor (1983) term collusion.
Despite collusion, silence in interaction is often attributable to a particular party or parties, making a verbal response relevantly absent (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). However, silence does not always simply mean absence. Although a response might be absent, the silence creates anticipation in parties who were not implicated in responding that can lead to additional, intervening talk or more attentive postures. Even when ‘nothing’ is happening, the implicated party can be doing doing nothing through their silence. Silence is performative and communicative in sometimes subtle ways. In co-present interaction, silence is inevitably accompanied by non-vocal behaviour, even if that behaviour is to remain still. By adopting a posture, one communicates ‘doing nothing’, ‘thinking’, etc. through one’s silence. Alternatively, interlocutors can produce a range of gestures with vague to precise meanings. All of these behaviours provide the context for others to understand the attributable silence, whereas silence on a telephone call might prompt one party to check whether the other is still on the line.
This is not to say that silence on the telephone does not convey meaning, only that one resource for avoiding conflict or saving face in such a situation is precisely the lack of additional information ordinarily provided in co-present interactions. That is, facial expressions and postures cannot ‘give away’ the meaning of the silence over the telephone, and thus one can assume silence to be performing positive functions, such as ‘good listening’, more readily. Steiner (1967, cited in Johannesen, 1974) offers a useful distinction, that silence is primarily non-verbalisation rather than non-symbolisation. Braithwaite (1990) and Samarin (1965, p. 115) argue that silence is indeed a symbolic resource in itself, not simply the absence of action or behaviour. Not only is silence potentially meaningful, but it is also potentially not meaningful (i.e. inconsequential or not indicative of negativity). Despite the possibility of meaningful, responsive behaviour occurring during silence, these actions and the silence containing them have largely been outside the remit of traditional linguistic approaches. Saville-Troike (1985) calls for an integrated theory of communication that addresses the performative and communicative properties of silence, gesture, and language.
[2.1] Contextual Considerations
As Gardner et al. (2009) discuss, silence can vary across cultures, but this does not necessarily mean that cultures value silence differently in the grand scheme of things. It is possible, rather, that they have different orientations to interactions that are manifested in different degrees of silence. Stivers et al. (2009) looked at silences between yes/no interrogatives and responses; the ten languages that they studied show similar distributions for most of the languages but with significant differences in the means. Stivers et al. propose that speakers of different languages have different calibrations of silence. Allwood (n.d., cited in Lehtonen & Sajavaara, 1985) hypothesises that cultures that have less tolerance for overlap have greater tolerance for silence and that cultures that have more tolerance for overlap have less tolerance for silence. This might be further dependent on sequential position, but preliminary evidence suggests that this is a reasonable hypothesis (Lehtonen & Sajavaara, 1985; Tannen, 1985).
However, this might not always be the case when further constraints on response timing are in effect. Nevile (2007) found that air crew members for major international airlines and air traffic controllers tended not to have silences at the boundaries of turns nor overlapping speech at any point in their interactions. Nevile (2006) also found that when precision timing does not occur between air crew and air traffic controllers, it is a possible sign that communication is impaired and that they may not be working together safely. In other words, ‘common but brief’ overlap (Sacks et al., 1974) that is observed in ordinary conversation was not only not observed but was extremely problematic for air crew and air traffic controllers. Although overlap was particularly indicative of problematic interaction, silence can lead to overlap. Silence can occasion participants beginning turns-at-talk, whether the turn is the sequentially implicated responsive action, a new initiating action, a repeat of the prior action, or pursuit of a preferred response. With all of these options available, participants sometimes begin speaking simultaneously following silence. Participants may begin speaking simultaneously due to possible problems with the preceding utterance[3], for example, or because once silence sets in there is a lack of clarity when and who will (or ought to) speak next. In ordinary conversation and most institutions, however, silence and overlap do not tend to have such extreme consequences that interactional difficulties in aviation can have.
Although psychotherapy is a type of interaction that is structured through talk (Philips, 1985), psychotherapy is a situation in which one might expect considerable silences as a matter of course, rather than as a sign of trouble. However, little empirical research has looked at silence in psychotherapeutic or counselling contexts. Most publications dealing with silence in psychotherapy are written from prescriptive, theoretical positions by practitioners who are writing from their own interpretations of their own practice (e.g., Prince, 1997). Many of these are written from a psychoanalytic perspective in which the therapist is taught to allow silence to occur despite interactional relevance of therapist speech (e.g., Prince, 1997). In psychoanalysis, silence is taken to be meaningful and attributable to the client except when the psychoanalyst deems the client ready to receive an interpretation (Haim, 1990). Attributions of the meaning of the silence can purportedly be made from how the psychoanalyst feels about the silence her- or himself (Blos, 1972). Fliess (1949) argues that silence can be viewed as a form of sphincter closure to cause retention (of words, substituting for excretory products) and to punish the psychoanalyst in an act of transference of feelings about a dominant, cold parent to the psychoanalyst. In 1961, the idea that silence was a sign of aggression on the part of the client had remained salient to psychoanalysis. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a special issue in this year on silence as a form of acting out (cited in Ephratt, 2008).
In other therapeutic approaches represented by writings on silence (e.g., crisis intervention, Scott & Lester, 1998; cf. Prince, 1997 from a psychoanalytic perspective), practitioners also express a struggle between silence and talk. Although authors that belong to other therapeutic camps do not tend to view silence as ‘urethral-erotic’, ‘anal-erotic’, or ‘oral-erotic’, as Fliess (1949) does, ‘resistance’ is a common theme, as is therapists’ discomfort with silence versus allowing opportunities for clients to speak. The conflicts expressed by these therapists over silence in their practice may not reflect how naturally occurring silence in psychotherapeutic contexts is treated by clients. In fact, silence can be a resource for communicating certain elements of an issue that are not easily verbalised (e.g., that a topic is sensitive) or for which verbalisation would call into question the veracity of the statement itself (e.g., that one is sincere).
Silverman and Peräkylä (1990; see also Silverman, 1996, pp. 63-88) found that both patients and HIV counsellors used silence as one way to mark topics as sensitive. They describe this as ‘hesitation’, which includes perturbations such as ‘um’. The key point for them is that the substantive talk is being delayed. In other words, participants were actively but momentarily avoiding discussing or mentioning topics that were delicate, often involving sexual partners, sexual activities, or health statuses. Berger (forthcoming) examines psychotherapy interactions and demonstrates that silence can contribute to the performance of sincerity. When responding to the therapist’s initiating actions, silences are used to demonstrate clients’ thoughtfulness or sincerity, and quick responses are treated as challenging and/or insincere.
[2.2] Conversation Analysis and Silence
Stivers & Rossano (2010a) critique the treatment of talk-focused interactions as a point of reference, noting that most of day to day human interaction does not involve long stretches of talk. Rather, talk is something that occurs when interactants need or want to convey particular information. This information may be of practical or theoretical importance to the participants, or it may be ‘small talk’ for the sole purpose of social bonding. Silence outside of talk-based interactions is inherently unproblematic until attempts to engage in talk-based interaction fail. Silence within talk-based interactions, on the other hand, has been a subject of study per se within social research. Kincaid (1979) points out on the other hand that epistemological biases toward discrete messages (i.e. talk) has hindered our understanding of the role of silence in social interaction. In some contexts, silence may even be more acceptable than talk (Ishii and Bruneau, 1988; Murphy, 1970; Johannesen, 1974) in terms of an overall approach to interaction, a fact that is largely ignored by minority world scholars except to the extent that ‘other cultures’ can be compared to mainstream American and Western European cultures. The meaning for participants of a particular silence is evident in how they treat it interactionally and the sequential environment in which it is situated. Alternatively, silence can have no particular meaning in the interactional context in which is occurs (Berger, 2011). We must be careful to analyse silence according to how it is used and treated by interactants themselves.
Silence has been an issue for CA since the early years of its development with regard to turn-taking and preference organisation. In Sacks et al.’s (1974) paper on turn-taking for conversation, different functions and meanings of silences are discussed in depth. The sequential position of a particular silence can tell interlocutors and analysts whether a response, for example, is relevantly absent and which party or parties ‘should’ be speaking. A silence following an initiating action also signals that a dispreferred response may be forthcoming. In order to obtain a preferred response after a silence has begun, the speaker of the initiating action may rephrase the initiating action, produce a slightly different action (e.g., suggesting seeing a film instead of having dinner), or produce an alternative action designed such that the same response is preferred according to the alternative action’s format (e.g., suggesting that a person might have class that night). Note that ‘dispreferred’ refers to actions that are interactionally sensitive, for example a refusal, but not necessarily what the speaker of the initiating action wants or does not want. A person can invite another to a party but not really want them to accept (and the invitee can know that it is an insincere invitation). However, a quick, unmitigated refusal would appear ungrateful and abrupt despite being what the inviter actually wants. By constructing the refusal as regretful, both parties are able to maintain politeness. With regard to the timing of silences, Jefferson (1988) suggests one second as an approximate ‘standard maximum’ for silence in conversation. However, as Gardner et al. (2009), Stivers et al. (2009), and Berger (2011) demonstrate, one second is not a universal maximum, even in English.
[3] Gesture Research
Non-vocal behaviour can occur with or without accompanying talk, that is, without or with silence, respectively, and meanings may vary according to whether it is done silently. Research involving non-vocal behaviour without accompanying talk has focused on gestures (rather than, say, accomplishing tasks). The meanings of gestures can vary across and within cultures (i.e. across sub-cultures), and their placements and use by interactants are diverse and multi-faceted. Even so-called universal (Ekman & Keltner, 1997) gestures such as smiling can be performed very differently in different cultures (Pike, 1982, p. 51), including in different cultures of non-human primates (Preuschoft & van Hooff, 1997). Although humans may have the same vocal and non-vocal resources available, how they are organised and utilised in different languages and cultures varies (Sapir, 1925; Hall, 1969; Birdwhistell, 1968). Because gestures, like languages, comprise such a wide and multi-faceted area of enquiry, it is impossible to provide an exhaustive account of gestures and gesture research in the limited space available, even for English-speaking countries alone. In this section I will give a brief history of gesture research, not limited to stand-alone gestures but without an exhaustive account of gesture in human and non-human interaction. This section aims to orient the reader not only to current directions in interactional gesture research but that which underpins it as well.
[3.1] Early Gesture Research
Early gesture research focused on their use in rhetoric with a focus on prescription for successful oratory (e.g., Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria) in relation to thematic aspects of gestures’ relationships to the ongoing talk. For many centuries, this approach dominated writings on gesture, and Bary (1679, cited in Kendon, 2004) produced a vocabulary of arm and hand gestures and body postures based on prescribed interactional meanings of the gestures rather than relationships with talk (e.g., frankness, tenderness, complaining). This approach continued into the 18th century, although it is in sharp contrast with current approaches to gesture. Engel (1785) returned in some ways to earlier systems by beginning his system with a distinction between body movements that originate from bodily states and those that are related to emotion and purposeful activity. The latter category is further divided into categories based on function, which are each also divided into either precursors to intentional activities or figurative gestures.
Austin (1806) based his classification system on Engel’s and deals extensively with hand gestures. Like classical writers on gesture, his primary focus was on gestures for orators. He looks at gesture from four viewpoints: the instrument (e.g., hand, head), signification (i.e. meaning), quality (e.g., boldness, simplicity), and style of delivery (i.e. the overall style including talk and its effects on the qualities of gestures). Most relevant to our analysis is the viewpoint of significance, which is divided into significant and non-significant gestures. Non-significant gestures are those that ‘do not mark any particular sentiment; but are rather used to denote a sort of general relation in the expressions, and derive their significance from the time and manner of their application, from the place in which they are used, and from their various combinations’, whereas significant gestures are those that are substantively communicative. Significant and non-significant gestures are then further subdivided similarly to Engel on a functional basis.
[3.2] Interactional Research
Unlike previous writers on gesture, Wundt (1921, cited in Kendon, 2004) deals exclusively with gestures that can occur without accompanying talk. His system of hand gestures describes such gestures in terms of their symbolic function and their physical implementation (or form). Wundt’s move away from oratory marks a beginning in the movement toward an interactional focus in gesture research. Although some authors today have specifically focused on the semiotics of gesture (e.g., Morris, 1994; Calbris, 1990), the majority of gesture research today is experimental or interactional in nature.
Efron’s (1941/1972) study of Eastern European Jewish and Southern Italian communities in New York City was perhaps the first truly interactional study of gesture and remains a key influential study in the field. Efron’s aim was to systemically examine the gestures of first generation immigrants and assimilated descendants of both groups. He noted similarities between the gestures of the assimilated descendants and showed that gestures are cultural rather than genetic. This finding refuted nazi propaganda at the time that claimed that gestural styles were racially inherited. Although Efron’s focus was on the similarities and differences of gestures across and within cultures, he deals with gesture from three viewpoints that contribute to a typology of gesture: spatio-temporal, inter-locutional, and linguistic. The most widely known of these perspectives is the linguistic, within which famous categories such as ‘emblem’ are described.
Ekman and Friesen (1969b) offer a categorical system of gestures, some of which are based on Efron’s. Their paper represents one of the formative works in ‘nonverbal behavior’ and ‘nonverbal communication’, and their work increasingly became concerned with detecting deception (e.g., 1969a). These pieces of research were of special interest to psychiatrists, and Ekman and Friesen’s (1969b) system received a wide and supportive audience due to its well-articulated structure during the early days of this area of enquiry (Kendon, 2004, p. 95). Their system accounts for a broad range of body movements and is arranged around three perspectives: usage, origin, and coding. Gestures may belong to multiple categories within each area. For example, they provide a Venn diagram (ibid. p. 57) demonstrating how interactive, idiosyncratic, communicative, and informative categories can apply to the same behaviours. Ekman and Friesen recognised that behaviour may be intentional or unintentional and may have shared or individual meanings; they also recognised ways in which in the transmission of that meaning may function interactionally. They present five categories of ‘nonverbal behavior’ (emblems, illustrators, affect displays, regulators, and adaptors) as a work in progress that is not intended to be an exhaustive list nor exclusive categories but to build on the work of Efron with a view toward evolving specification.
Another influential perspective on gesture research is that of Ray L. Birdwhistell. Birdwhistell is famous for his framework of kinesics, which began with the application of a structural linguistics system onto non-vocal behaviour. The system he proposed borrowed terminology from structural linguistics to create concepts such as the kine and kineme (after concepts such as phone and phoneme). Unfortunately, because Birdwhistell was most concerned with teaching and avoided published anything he did not consider perfect, little work has been done in the field of kinesics (Kendon & Sigman, 1996). His ideas, have, however, stimulated the field of gesture studies. Adopting a structural linguistic framework in the development of kinesics was not a prescriptive approach but simply a starting point. Birdwhistell was concerned with the whole of co-present social interaction and saw it as a patterned system that could be analysed. This approach later became known as ‘context analysis’ (Scheflen, 1963, 1973).
Compared to more category-rich systems of gesture research, context analysis looks at the whole of an interaction, of which non-vocal behaviour is one part. Scheflen is one of the few who have employed kinesics as a methodology, and it is thoroughly incorporated into Scheflen’s version of context analysis. Context analysis has been described by Kendon and Sigman (1996) as a methodology ‘in which patterns of behavior in interaction are described and interpreted in terms of the contexts in which they occur’ and which are ‘aimed at systematic description of the total organization of behavior in interaction’ as opposed to those that study components of interaction in isolation from their situated use.
This definition of context analysis is more in line with Birdwhistell’s theoretical approach to interaction than how kinesics was and continues to be taken up by popular culture, academics, and practitioners alike – as ‘body language’. Although Birdwhistell approached non-vocal behaviour from a structural linguistics framework, he never intended that it would be considered language but rather a part of a cohesive whole that is human interaction (Kendon & Sigman, 1996, p. 245). ‘Body language’ is a misnomer that implies that non-vocal behaviours have specific meanings and are produced in syntactically appropriate ways to communicate consciously. Although the structural linguistics-based framework of kinesics is such that non-vocal behaviours may be combined to form complex kinemorphs that are equivalent to words or ideas, non-vocal behaviours are not placed such that a grammar or syntax per se exists outside of sign languages. However, non-vocal behaviours can stand in syntactic places that are structured by talk. Pike (1954/1967) describes a common party game at the time in which participants gradually replace words with signs that visually represent the words being replaced. He uses this example to illustrate how inattention to non-vocal behaviour (and in this case, specifically non-vocal practices, a term I use to describe those behaviours that perform specific interactional functions but which may or may not be gestures) can lead to misinterpretation of spoken language.
Pike’s major work Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior was written in three volumes and published between 1954 and 1960 with an updated second edition in 1967. It covers a range of linguistic issues including non-vocal behaviour. Although Pike primarily studied the languages of indigenous societies (drawing heavily on his teacher Edward Sapir), and devotes much of volumes two and three to this endeavour, the first volume of this work covers more general linguistic issues. Volume one deals with most of the issues that are directly relevant to non-vocal behaviour as an area of study. It is also in this volume that he coins the terms etic and emic. Etic refers to perspectives or analyses that are intended to treat all groups equally and is characterised as generated from an outsider’s perspective. It is sometimes described as objective, as Pike himself on occasion does in his description of it. However, Pike’s use of ‘objective’ does not imply a realist or empiricist objectivity. Rather, Pike’s notion of objectivity is simply that of an outsider’s judgement along with all of the values and experience that that outsider might bring. Multiple researchers may describe the same phenomena differently yet all come from an etic position. Emic, on the other hand, describes perspectives or analyses that reflect what is meaningful to participants, rather than based on the outsider’s perspective. Although an outsider may describe a phenomenon, they may do so from an emic perspective by finding out what is meaningful to those involved. Etic and emic do not represent discrete categories of descriptions but rather are two extremes on a continuum. Pike states that when a person first approaches a group with whom they have not had contact before, they will always have an etic perspective. As they become more familiar with the values and practices of the group, they will develop an emic perspective.
Pike’s concepts of etic and emic are useful for the understanding of conversation analytic approaches. A key feature of CA is that it is able to describe both structural regularity across cases (i.e. an etic perspective) as well as how individual parties in particular interactions orient to structures and interactional resources (i.e. an emic perspective). CA strives to marry these two perspectives to achieve a multi-level description of social interaction (Schegloff, 1987). Although CA’s methodology is based primarily in talk, the flexibility of CA in examining particular interactions and corpora has relevance for the study of non-vocal behaviour. As I have mentioned above, the meanings and use of non-vocal behaviour are dependent on a variety of factors such as the immediate sequential environment and the broader cultures to which the interactants and setting belong. Both issues must be considered in the interpretation of individual instances. However, the broader structural features of interaction are often quite regular across participants and situations. In discussing individual cases, analysts are able to demonstrate how a practice can be used by interactants as well as some of the effects that conversational organisations have on interactants’ actions (Schegloff, 1987).
Whilst many interactionally based researchers take the perspective that interaction must be studied as a whole (e.g., Pike, 1967), some take a more language-focused approach to gesture. McNeill (1985, p. 350) makes the (perhaps still) cutting edge statement that the designation of ‘linguistic’ as what we can write down and non-linguistic as everything else ‘is a cultural artefact and an arbitrary limitation derived from a particular historical evolution.’ This is in itself a bold statement against ethnocentrism and ableism for his time. McNeill, in proposing a new way to view the study of gesture, asks us to question conventional minority world linguistics and psychology of language assumptions. He goes on to provide an account of why, in his view, gesture is verbal.
McNeill presents a revolutionary and radical approach for the time in which So You Think Gestures Are Nonverbal? was written. He argues that gestures, including ‘referential’ and ‘discourse-oriented’, are ‘verbal’, because ‘(a) Gestures occur only during speech, (b) they have semantic and pragmatic functions that parallel those of speech, (c) they are synchronized with linguistic units in speech, (d) they dissolve together with speech in aphasia, and (e) they develop together with speech in children’ (ibid. p. 353). These claims are, however, weakened by a number of pieces of evidence:
(a) He claims that gestures only occur during speech production (ibid. p. 353), despite also claiming that ‘more than 90%’ occur during speech production (i.e. that approximately 10% of gestures do not occur during speech production) (ibid. p. 354).
(b & c) Whilst he makes a strong case that certain gestural patterns are associated with and usually synchronised with speech production (ibid. p. 354-361), he provides no evidence that they are necessarily or inherently intertwined (but see later work on the link between speech production and spontaneous gesture, such as Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2001).
(d) He lumps aphasias into one broad category (ibid. p. 361-362), whilst clinical and experimental evidence shows strong differences between types of aphasia and their effects on gesture and speech (See Feyereisen, 1987 for a specific critique of McNeill’s treatment of aphasia). Moreover, recent cognitive neurolinguistics research has shown that people do not have uniform neural pathways for language and information (Łojek, 2009). The elaborate use of gesture by people with aphasia (e.g., Goodwin, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2011) also suggests that at least referential gestures may in fact increase with aphasia, as people try to find other ways to communicate.
(e) While he reviews the literature on gesture and language development in children more thoroughly than aphasia, there is no clear indication that gesture and language develop synchronically in children, but rather that physical play may be a precursor to gesture and not necessarily to language (ibid. p. 362-365). The youngest gesturer they recorded was 5 years old, far older than a child who can be expected to use language. See Butterworth & Hadar (1989) for a thorough critique of McNeill’s assumptions regarding language development.
One of the most common aspects of modern gesture research is the recognition that communication is not merely a product of multiple parallel channels providing different information. Rather, information is communicated as a combination of different kinds of resources and modalities that moderate one another. This is particularly evident in the work of Birdwhistell and Pike, but prominent gesture researchers such as Kendon (1995) continue to address this issue. Kendon takes a broad, social psychological approach to gesture research and displays a tendency to examine particular gestures or classes of gestures in how they are used in social interaction (e.g., Kendon, 2002). Kendon’s interactional focus in his empirical work parallels that of conversation analysis in some ways, such as the use of detailed transcripts to illustrate phenomena and a sequential orientation to some problems. Kendon’s work is variably concerned with conversational structures (e.g., Kendon, 1997, p. 114), interactional frameworks (e.g., Kendon, 1988a), and semiotics of gesture (e.g., Kendon, 2002).
[3.3] Conversation Analysis and Gesture
CA began through the study of telephone calls and audio-recorded co-present interactions. Focus on talk in the early days of CA helped to make the actions performed by parties explicit. However, both Goffman and Garfinkel, who influenced the development of CA in substantive ways, were concerned with broader issues such as how people engage with one another (e.g., Goffman, 1967) and how social institutions are constituted by the people within and interacting with them (e.g., Garfinkel, 1967). Nevertheless, most research within a CA framework on non-vocal practices has focused on gestures that occur with accompanying talk. Whether the (continued) focus on talk developed from engagement with the opportunities afforded by the data available at the time or whether it started with a talk-focused ideology cannot be answered conclusively. However, the ideology does not have to remain. The focus on action formation that underpinned early sequence organisational studies is a useful way to approach gestures and other non-vocal practices. By having an existing body of research on how talk is structured, the task of studying non-vocal practices becomes simplified. Because non-vocal practices do not usually constitute the whole of an interaction, their functions in alternation with and alongside talk become visible through their sequential positions, originally identified through work on talk.
The research of Jürgen Streeck and Charles and Marjorie Goodwin has been particularly influential in conversation analytic work on non-vocal behaviour. Streeck’s approach is cross-cultural and deals primarily with speakers’ hand gestures in co-present interactions with adults who do not have communication difficulties (e.g., Streeck, 2009a). Charles Goodwin’s work on non-vocal behaviour concentrates on the communicative resources available to people with aphasia (e.g., Goodwin, 2004), and Marjorie Goodwin’s work has focused on the communicative resources of children (e.g., Goodwin, Goodwin, & Yaeger-Dror, 2002). Research on gestures and other non-vocal practices from a CA perspective has, as mentioned previously, concentrated on how non-vocal practices facilitate or enhance talk.
Lerner, Zimmerman, and Kidwell (2011) have, conversely, identified task structures as an area of sequentiality to which even very young children orient. Lerner et al.’s analysis is built primarily around the example of a mother and small children preparing for lunch. They demonstrate how the participants orient to phases of the task and sequentiality of actions within the task in designing turns-at-talk and performing non-vocal behaviours. In their words, the ‘episodic and formal phase structure’ is a ‘resource for action’. Lerner et al.’s findings both enhance and challenge conversation analytic thought on non-vocal practices. Non-vocal practices (particularly tasks) can themselves be sequentially structured resources. In Lerner et al.’s data, non-vocal practices function somewhat external to the organisation of talk, but the process of preparing for a meal is an interaction that is structured through silence (Philips, 1985). Although their analysis lends support for viewing non-vocal practices as sequential resources, they do not definitively address tasks within what conversation analysts commonly know as sequences, that is, actions built around pairs of actions and expansions upon them.
Sacks and Schegloff (2002; cf. McNeill, 1992, p. 83) describe the internal phases of gestures that occur concurrently with talk and show how gestures reach an apex before returning to ‘home position’. The interactional relevance of this structure has been further discussed by Cibulka (2012), who shows that gestures can have multiple home positions at points along the way and that these intermediate home positions function differently from the initial home position. The intermediate home positions maintain engagement and readiness to respond, whilst the returning to the initial home position indicates completeness or withdrawal. As with Lerner et al.’s (2011) work, Sacks and Schegloff (2002) and Cibulka (2012) address structural concerns that do not map directly onto the sequential structure of conversations but which indicate that some level of sequentiality is at play.
Individual non-vocal resources have been described in terms of their sequential positions within interactions that are structured through talk. For example, gestures that are performed by one party and are then repeated by another party during a subsequent turn-at-talk (‘return gestures’, de Fornel, 1992; Koschmann and LeBaron, 2002, p. 262) are used to display intersubjectivity. Interrelated vocal and non-vocal practices can be used by participants in alternation with each other within the same turn-at-talk as well. Olsher (2004) describes how actions begun by talk can be completed by gestures. Little research has examined the functions of non-vocal practices that constitute entire actions, however Seo and Koshik (2010) and Mortensen (2012) have identified a small number of gestures that function as repair/correction initiators and regularly receive verbal responses in foreign language classrooms. Additionally, Whitehead (2011) has described variations on nodding that are used by the speaker of an initiating action following a response. Although specific non-vocal resources with apparent sequential positions and that have implications for the ongoing interaction have been identified, the broader role of non-vocal practices within sequence organisation remains unexamined.
[4] Conclusion
Although silence is often perceived in minority world cultures as inaction or inactivity, people may perform many communicative activities during or through silence. These activities can emphasise ‘doing nothing’, or although the interactant is not progressing the interaction verbally, something else is relevantly occurring (e.g., ‘doing thinking’ or non-vocal reactions). If they are in fact doing something, to quote Sacks and Schegloff (1973), ‘why that now?’ Although the structural organisation of non-vocal practices has been addressed in terms of socially relevant internal sequences, the sequential role of non-vocal practices within interactions that are structured through talk has only been examined in terms of particular practices. How, then, do non-vocal practices function within sequences? In order to understand the role of non-vocal practices such as gesture, we must first understand how silence, which has traditionally been conceptualised as occupying sequential space as the absence of talk, is treated by participants. In other words, how does silence function within the sequential environment in relation to other activities? How does context affect silence and non-vocal practices? If one organisation (or aspect of an organisation) is affected, are all organisations (or aspects of that organisation) affected? These questions must be answered in order to develop a comprehensive approach to co-present interaction.
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[1] Although Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory and Goffman’s (1955) concept of face cannot be applied to all cultures (e.g., Matsumoto, 1988; Ide, 1989), they have a degree of usefulness in relation to our current discussion of silence.
[2] Minority world refers to the approximately 17% of the world that is commonly called ‘western’ or ‘developed’ in contrast to majority world, which refers to the approximately 83% of the world that is often called ‘developing’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘third world’, etc. Majority world also includes indigenous societies within geopolitical borders that are claimed by minority world states (Alam, 2007).
[3] This is true at least in minority world conversations. Philips (1976, p. 88) notes that people of the Warm Springs Nation rarely begin speaking simultaneously despite frequent long silences.