How to Do Things Without Words

Tom Grimwood and Paul K. Miller

Introduction

The impact of J.L. Austin’s Speech-Act Theory has resonated throughout the social

sciences over the last three decades, not least in its catalysis of the so-called linguistic

turn and the rise of cultural studies. Since this original shockwave, a great deal of

innovation and progress in the study of ordinary language itself has emanated from

these social sciences, not least among which is Harvey Sacks’ Conversation Analytic

approach (see Sacks, 1972; 1984; 1992a; 1992b). Pioneered by Sacks, and strongly

influenced by1 the methods of ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel (1967; 1996;

2007), Conversation Analysis (henceforth CA) has, over the last four decades, built

on many of the foundational principles of Austin’s work in developing a working

corpus of research addressing how ordinary conversation works in concrete,

empirical situations. The flow of intellectual influence with respect to the

understanding of how “ordinary language” works has, however, been largely

monodirectional; ideas have moved steadily from philosophy into the realms of the

social sciences, with very little converse drift. In this chapter it is argued that, despite

this historically-ingrained disciplinary tide, there is much that CA can “give back” to

Austin scholars – particularly in terms of the how dialogue might be pragmatically

conceptualised. As a thematic lynchpin, focus falls chiefly upon Sacks’ criticisms of

the persistent employment of invented and “ideal” cases of language-use endemic to

the Speech-Act tradition. Using such idealisations is, from Sacks’ perspective,

inimical to any claim regarding the provision of insight into the “ordinary” language

that actually manifests in real social interactions. Furthermore, the implications of

this important charge are elucidated herein with reference to one particular

substantive2 component of conversational practice in which the discrepancies

between “real” and “ideal” examples become especially salient: silence.

One might, perhaps logically, raise questions regarding whether

conversational silence is meaningful and/or problematic for Austin’s speech-act

1 And sometimes directly integrated with; see Garfinkel and Sacks (1970). 2 Or wholly insubstantive, depending upon ones point of view.

theory at all. It is, after all, the very absence of speech. Drawing upon work in the CA

tradition, however, this chapter will make the case that silence can be, and frequently

is, a profoundly meaningful component of our ordinary interactions. The chapter

will further examine how situated uses of silence, as constructed (and constructive)

modes of communication, highlight certain formative features of conversation that

are either overlooked or underplayed in Austin’s account: in particular, the

importance of sequencing, the ad hoc construction of context, and the ways in which

ownership is ascribed to cases of “non-speech.”

Conversation Analysis and Philosophical Inquiry

There are, of course, interesting discussions to be had on the subject of silence from

within Austin’s theory in and of itself. The more general emphasis of this chapter is,

however, upon the relationship between Austin’s work and one of the social

scientific traditions that followed in his wake. To these ends, it is valuable to note

that Sacks described CA, from its outset, as being concerned primarily with the

“technology of conversation” (1984, p.413): that is, with the taken-for-granted

(though highly skilled) techniques through which members of society construct and

maintain their local social order. Garfinkel (1967, p.2) dubs these techniques

“ethnomethods;” practices that comprise the tacit background conventions upon

which people draw in their day-to-day activities. For example, the ideas that

comprise “common sense” are, for Garfinkel, not only a kind of heuristic rationality,

but are also embedded within social practices and interactions that are recurrently

performed and legitimated. Thus, for practitioners of ethnomethodology and CA, it

is the business of doing everyday things that gives rise to the very notion of what the

“everyday” is.

Like Austin, both Sacks and Garfinkel argue that ordinary language had been

largely treated as a residual category in academic study. Just as Austin’s How to Do

Things with Words stresses the importance of social convention, context and

interlocutory “uptake” for meaningful interaction to occur, so the analysis of

conversation in terms of the rules and practices which generate values must be

supplemented by interrogation of how meaning is intersubjectively and locally

constructed. As aforementioned, however, Sacks’ own reflections on Austinian

method are not entirely uncritical. In particular, while praising Austin for his

movement into “ordinary language philosophy” and sharing his emphasis on the

importance of residual categories, Sacks (1992b) argues that Austin’s work is

centrally paralysed by its repeated use of invented examples as evidence to support

assertions, examples which are, through their very fictionality, isolate (i.e. decoupled

from any local, pragmatic context of transmission or interpretation). Despite Austin’s

famous dismissal of literature (or etiolations) as “unreal,” his idealisations of the

commonplace linguistic activities of everyday life – promising, betting, naming a

ship and so on – are only empirical data in the loosest of senses. Sacks, meanwhile,

argues that one only has to examine real cases of talk as they unfold in order to

observe their context-specificity and ultimate turn-by-turn unpredictability. As such:

One cannot invent new sequences of conversation and feel happy with them. You may

be able to take ‘a question and answer’, but if we have to extend it very far, then the

issue of whether somebody would really say that, after, say, the fifth utterance, is one

for which we could not confidently argue. One doesn’t have a strong intuition for

sequencing in conversation. (Sacks, 1992b, p.5)3

Consequently, from a conversation analytic point of view, How To Do Things With

Words could be said to be more of an examination of assumed commonplaces, than

an analysis of embodied ordinary language. While such commonplaces are, to a

degree, essential in any form of argument – there must be, after all, some shared

sense of what we are arguing over to start with – they carry with them certain risks.

Perhaps the most fundamental of these is that relying upon what Searle (1977, p.204)

terms the “fairly obvious” for authority risks defining “ordinariness” itself in an

entirely unreflexive manner. Conceptualising what exactly constitutes ordinary

language, meanwhile, is also far more troublesome than it may putatively appear.

Two particular complexities of this order are particularly pertinent to the issue of

silence, and will be explored in turn.

Firstly, a distinct problem arises from trying to understand “everydayness” in

terms of a non-everyday, i.e. idealised, structure of meaning. This mode of

3 It is noteworthy at this point, for those unfamiliar with Sacks’ work, that the rather conversational manner in which the bulk of his work is presented is a direct output of his premature death in 1975. At that stage, he had published comparatively little formal research. The mass of his thought was, however, conveyed through his lectures programmes at UCLA where it was captured on tape, and transcribed, by his students. This corpus of transcripts was subsequently assembled into the two-volumes of Lectures on Conversation (Sacks, 1992a; 1992b).

understanding can be seen, perhaps most pressingly, in Ferdinand de Saussure’s

(1959) famous distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech). Centrally,

Saussure proposed that la langue is homogeneous in character, an abstract set of

underpinning principles (grammar, syntax and so forth) which is social, systematic

and analysable, “…a self-contained whole and principle of classification” (1959, p.9)

without which no meaningful incidence of parole would be possible. Parole, on the

other hand, is “…many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas

simultaneously [...]. We cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot

discover its unity.” (Ibid.). Saussure thus maintains that language “…is not a

function of the speaker; it is a product passively assimilated by the individual. It

never requires premeditation, and reflection enters in only for the purposes of

classification.” (1959, p.14). In short, everyday speech is just too ‘messy’ an object for

formal investigation and, consequently, langue is for Saussure the only touchstone

from which proper analysis can proceed.

Nominally, at least, Austin seems keen to avoid this kind of clean/messy

bifurcation. Rather than regard ordinary language as a distorted and misleading

version of some ideal and logically coherent communication, for Austin (just as for

Wittgenstein) it is the “…philosopher’s misunderstanding and misuse (even abuse)

of ordinary language – not ordinary language itself – that generates philosophical

confusion.” (Fogelin, 2009, p.8). Sacks argues, however, that through the very

practice of employing invented examples, such philosophies simply re-introduce just

such a distinction, by ignoring aspects of conversation which, whilst essential to

communicative interaction, nevertheless may not fit cleanly within a propositional

framework. The result is a tension within the very idea of an “ordinary language

philosophy” itself: a tension between language in its everyday, mundane sense, with

all of its slip ups, miscommunications, and mishearings, and the scientific-

philosophical requirement of systematic explanation. Ordinary language philosophy

can either, from this point of view, be “ordinary” or “philosophical.” Being both at

the same time is somewhat more problematic.

This leads us to our second complexity, which relates to the nature of

‘commonplaces’ themselves. While we may well chiefly identify commonplace

sayings (‘I name this ship...’, ‘I take this man to be my husband...’ etc.) in terms of a

collection of recognisable words, it is not always the case that commonplaces are

fully defined by verbal usage. Indeed, certain topics of discussion could be said to be

rendered “ordinary” precisely by a certain resistance to being talked about: mental

illness, for example4.

To a degree, one could find Sacks’ critique of Austin slightly superficial.

While the two may share certain basic assumptions, it could well be argued, the

philosopher and the social scientist are effectively doing different things, asking

different questions of the everyday, and thus, unsurprisingly, utilising slightly

different sources to reach slightly different conclusions. Such a charge, however,

leads us to an unhelpful disciplinary impasse. To put it in the most general terms, we

would be upholding a broad assumption that social scientists can criticise

philosophers for lacking empirical evidence and depending too much on thought-

experiments; philosophers, meanwhile, can criticise social scientists for simply

reporting the world in debilitative detail without providing definitive guiding

frameworks for understanding it. This impasse is particularly unhelpful when we

consider how the relationship between Austin and Sacks is typically cast as one-way.

It reproduces academic divisions whereby the philosopher provides the big thesis

and the sociologist (in this case) provides the empirical hypothesis. It does not leave

space for conversation analysts to effectively “talk back” to scholars of Austin’s

ordinary language philosophy. Exploration of the role of silence in conversation, as a

case study, however, provides us with some ways of thinking past this ostensive

chasm.

Why Study Silence?

If the premise of speech-act theory is that saying can also be doing, then one could

argue that not-saying might be something of a non-problem. Austin’s preliminary

discussion in How To Do Things With Words introduces the distinction between

constative and performative speech-acts. The former verifiable by its referential truth or

falsity: “the cat sat on the mat” is either true or false, depending on whether the cat is

actually sitting on the floor coverings or not. The latter establishes its truth only

through its performance. Saying “I name this ship…” is not verifiable by an external

reference, because the speaker is, by speaking the sentence, also doing the act. For

both of these, it is initially difficult to see how saying nothing can be categorised as

4 This point was captured by a recent advert that pressed the need to “talk” about mental illness, implying that a major obstacle to understanding certain conditions was the refusal to recognise it as something one could talk about in public spaces.

either a constative or a performative statement. Saying nothing is simply not

speaking at all, and therefore seems rather irrelevant to what is, after all, a speech-act

theory.

In some respects, Austin himself lays this argument to rest later in his lecture

series by utilising two new categories of statement that capture in more detail the

force of a statement (the “act” of the speech) rather than its referential meaning;

illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts. Crucially, he notes that both types of act

can be “…brought off non-verbally…” (Austin, 1961, p.120), on the condition that

they are “conventionally” or “non-conventionally” non-verbal. Indeed, G.J. Warnock

goes further than this when he claims that perlocutionary effects “…will very often be

producible… in some completely non-verbal way.” (Warnock, 1989, p.123 [emphasis

added]). Austin has in mind here particular non-verbal actions; the raising of a hand

to stop someone, in place of a verbal warning, for example. As such, the structure of

the non-verbal act follows that of its verbal equivalent.

It is noteworthy here that Austin’s particular discussion substitutes the

absence of speech with a physical action. Gesture is, very arguably, not identical with

silence. It is not clear whether this is simply a pedagogical strategy to make the point

clear through “obvious” (ideal) examples, or a more prescriptive limitation on the

understanding of speech-acts. Perhaps non-verbal acts actually require, for Austin,

some kind of visual action – after all, one problem of describing a non-verbal act in

terms of conventions is that such conventions are presumably based on a degree of

repetition. It may well, however, be difficult to recognise when silence is a repetition

of a previous silence, or a completely new silence. Either way, using these particular

examples of non-verbal communication allows Austin to retain the unit of measure

that remains consistent throughout his Speech-Act Theory, which is the sentence

uttered by someone, or the action done by someone. This is to say, while Austin disputes

philosophy’s reliance on constative propositions, his examples often retain the form

of the propositional unit: the single ‘statement’ uttered by someone, a single action

done by someone. If we are to adopt this position as default, we are not left with a

strong understanding of silence itself as an affective aspect of conversation, but rather

as its incidence simply being a “gap” between more interesting things.

If we are to take Austin’s comments as-read, we might well seem limited to

treating silence as some kind of substitute speech. Of course, literally saying nothing –

as opposed to the wider remit of non-verbal communication – is still used in public

speaking: rhetorical orators have long used dramatic pauses and rhetorical questions

to amplify their expression. It should be noted, though, that these are usually based

on conventions of monologue rather than dialogue. That is to say, the audience is taken

to be essentially passive (at least, if the illocution is successful), and, by the wider

conventions that guarantee its success, they are not expected to interrupt. Silence, in

this sense, is not ambiguous although this lack of ambiguity depends on conventions

of speaking that go well beyond a mere propositional framework. The distinction

between active and passive audiences is, perhaps, a subtle but telling incongruity

between that which is taken as ordinary language and that which is understood to be

ordinary conversation.

Moving aside from the conventions of public oration, then, Helen Steward

has discussed the case of silence in her book The Ontology of Mind. Steward’s

argument is that while “events” are generally philosophically identified as some

kind of change, there can also be events that are changeless. She adds that the class of

such an event is “extremely small” (Steward, 1997, p.70). ‘[J]ust occasionally,” she

suggests, “we do have reason to use the language of happening even in the absence

of change.” The most fruitful example is “…the saying of nothing,” which, she

explains, may be “…itself merely a continuation of a silence that has persisted,

perhaps, for many hours,” but can nevertheless mark the development of something

with significance:

Sometimes, as it were, we use our language to carve out events from a part of

space and time where things remain unaltered. Usually, there is nothing to

command our attention in such dreary scenes, but from time to time, an aspect of

an unchanging situation can have a significance which warrants the use of the

language of events. (Steward, 1997, p.71)

Steward’s interrogation of silence is brief, but instructive: not just in the positive

manner in which saying nothing is shown to have a relevance to the study of

language and events, but also from a more critical perspective in the limits of what

Steward’s approach allows her to say. First of all, it is not clear why Steward sees the

need to dismiss the significance of saying nothing as inherently “dreary,” or to

accentuate the marginality of these events (normality, Steward seems to suggest,

does not feature heavy doses of silence and inaction)5. Secondly, as a hypothetical

example, and exemption, silence is inevitably somewhat abstract in Steward’s

account. As a result, there simply ‘is’ silence, as a case problem for the language of

events as changes. This seems to confirm a pre-existing order of meaning. Silence is

not speaking; it is the emptying of language from conversation, and in turn (given

that this is taken to be an “extremely small”’ group of cases) speaking is generally

where real meaning lies.

We could speculate that there is a wider philosophical “convention” for

dealing with silence in play here, one which might be summarised in Wittgenstein’s

famous conclusion to the Tractatus that we should “pass over in silence” that of

which we cannot speak about. In short: silence is where philosophy stops

(Wittgenstein, 1961, p.74). However questionable the context of the early

Wittgenstein’s statement now seems, it remains fair to say that the absence of speech

is generally seen as either an anomaly or a negation in much philosophical thinking,

just as it is in the tradition of cognitive science (Heritage, 1984). Fundamentally,

silence represents nothing and is, therefore, also ostensibly nothing. In the same way,

dialogical rhetoric argues that silence displays weakness to the opposition (see

Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1971, p.108-109)6. Hence, we seem to be circuitously

arriving back at Austin’s initial stance on silence, which stemmed from the notion

that the very absence of a proposition renders propositional analysis something of a

problem task7.

Context and Speech-Acts

The rather straightforward problem with the implicit ordering of words above

silence is that it will always deal with silence as an anomaly, or exception to the

5 The remark that silence is usually “dreary” is even more curious when it carries the assumption that we would rather listen to someone saying anything at all than nothing. Standing idioms such as “silence is golden” would appear to indicate that there is a distinct everyday position favouring the converse. 6 Likewise, as Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca note, silence can be appropriated as an “admission,” either of a lack of response or a confirmation of a given fact (1971, p.108). In both cases, this supports the salient conceptualisation of silence as “non-thought.” 7 There are categories that would seem the exception to this rule, of course. One could think of Theodor Adorno’s ‘inexpressible’ (1990); Rae Langton’s use of the ‘unspeakable’ (1993); Judith Butler’s work on censorship (1997), etc. We could also look back to medieval negative theology and the significance of apophaticism. All of these could be said to give us an account of ‘meaningfully saying nothing’. They also take us into discussions of particular institutional and legal conventions that are beyond the scope of this paper to address.

norm. But it is not clear that this is necessarily the case. Austin himself locates the

authority of “everyday” speech within ordinary language’s resistance to the limits of

constative statements. The originality of Austin’s work, in this sense, is to emphasise

the force of words themselves as much as that of their referents. But if meaning is

located in force, then nobody could reasonably dispute that silence can be extremely

powerful.

Consider, for example, the different dynamics at work when one member of a

relationship observes to the other that they’re being particularly quiet today; or the

long drawn-out pauses on the telephone between both members as that relationship

inevitably breaks down; or finally the inevitable silence as one member waits and

wills for the other to call. Consider the tense silence at the beginning of an academic

seminar when no student wants to answer the tutor’s question; or the moments of

anticipation when an interlocutor hesitates to respond to a complex question; an

anticipation that hinges on the ambiguity of whether they are thinking through a

complex answer, or simply not understanding the question.

We could consider a possible Austinian defence here, and argue that all of

these examples, while recognisable, are nonetheless breakdowns of communication

rather than “successful” interactions. To this end, there are a number of more

successful silences we might identify: two minute silences, silent protests, ritual

silences such as prayer and so on, all of which suggest an altogether more

constructive function – silence itself as an organised social practice. The point herein

is that silence communicates, and does so in ways that cannot be completely satisfied

by any straightforward analogy with the propositional spoken word. Silence is as

such is as much a part of everyday conversation as non-silence (statistically and

functionally). True, it may still be used to indicate, and/or be interpreted as,

dissatisfaction without active criticism or puzzlement without correction (Davidson,

1984); it may be indicative of “extreme politeness” (Tannen, 1989) or nervous

hesitation, uncertainty, ignorance, simple lack of interest, and so on. But that is not to

say that such symbols do not flood our day to day activities and, while mundane,

they are certainly not trivial.

The problem, perhaps, is not silence itself, but a contextual framework that

allows us to identify silence as meaningful or not. It is this, after all, that meaningful

silence is an anomaly or exception to. But in turn, perhaps this is not a single

“convention,” but rather a number of competing layers of context.

Context is, of course, something of a sticking point within Speech-Act Theory.

We will remember the much-quoted line from How To Do Things With Words, where

Austin argues, provisionally, that for a performative utterance to succeed, “…there

must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect,

that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain

circumstances.’ (1962, p.26) In terms of analysing conversation, such a provision

(however open to exploration) provides a healthy ground upon which to interrogate

ordinary language. We have also seen that Austin is not averse to the idea of non-

verbal “acts” that do things. As far as this goes, introducing silence into the category

of speech-acts does not seem as awkward as it may have first appeared, and we have

previously discussed Austin’s own attempts at doing so. But there are two issues that

need to be raised at this stage.

Firstly, there is something of an inherent ambiguity to all of the hypothetical

examples above that problematises the notion of context as a relatively static ground

upon which meaning and non-meaning is decided. For Austin, this attention to the

possible failures of ordinary language leads to two important points: on the one

hand, it re-asserts the need for a philosophical account of everyday conversation, to

safeguard the judgement of the “right-ness” or “wrong-ness” of a speech-act. On the

other hand, while the “…uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the,

leading incident in the performance of the act,” Austin notes that the speech itself

“…is far from being usually, even if it is ever, the sole thing necessary if the act is to

be deemed to have been performed.” (1962, p.8). The task of designating felicitous

and infelicitous speech-acts requires attending to the significance of context, or, in

Austin’s words, the total speech situation. “We must,” he argues, “consider the total

situation in which the utterance is issued – the total speech-act – if we are to see the

parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go

wrong.” (1962, p.52). As such, Austin stresses the need to move beyond propositional

understandings of language. But the very impossibility of “saturating” or completely

satisfying any given “total speech-act” or context moves Austin later on in his

lectures to reintroduce the intentionality of the speaker as a determinant of meaning.

The same is often done for silence: for example, when the question of the meaning of

silence is turned into a purely psychological one, such as “Why are you being quiet?”

This return to intentionalism, however, risks situating our understanding of silence

within the realm of monologue, rather than dialogue.

Secondly, a problem arises when Austin, by privileging a certain idea of

intentionality as the mark of success for an illocutionary act, essentially ‘fills in’ the

gaps of silence with more language (albeit presumed, acted, or necessitated language).

But this tacitly accepts the hierarchy of speech over non-speech before we have

engaged with any actual data. As such, it is not surprising that the essential

ambiguity of silent moments – the absence of explicit intentionality, the difficult in

recognising conventions and so on – is rather too quickly reduced to ‘non-meaning’.

Furthermore, it does not matter from this point on how many invented examples are

brought forward to support the case, as they will all implicitly conform to the

presupposed model. The data becomes a mere illustration of what is effectively the

necessary structure for philosophically understanding everyday language. It can be

argued, however, that this implicit ordering of silence as an anomaly of speech leads

Austin back to a form of intentionalism that would seem to remove any need to look

at conversational dialogue in the first place. In turn, the precedence of the speaker’s

intention removes the various dynamic aspects of silence that can give it such force –

its ambiguities, uncertainties and tensions, as well as its potential to express trust and

respect. We therefore need to sidestep the recourse to intentionality that establishes a

particular order of convention or context.

Sacks, CA and Silence

Whereas Austin writes of the total speech situation, Harvey Sacks – like Harold

Garfinkel - points to an altogether different model of context, based on the

ethnomethods utilised by participants in everyday conversation themselves. Rather

than context being taken as a relatively static, mutually-familiar grounding upon

which statements “make sense,” and which can be read-off by the analyst, the

immediate context of any utterance is taken to be the surrounding talk; typically, the

previous and subsequent utterances in the conversation. These utterances both

influence and verify intersubjective meaning in-situ, which is to say that talk itself is

both context-shaped and context-renewing (Heritage, 1984). As such:

The situation of action is essentially transformable. It is identifiable as the

reflexive product of the organized activities of the participants. As such, it is on-

goingly discovered, maintained, and altered as a project and a product of

ordinary actions. Situational constitution is essentially a ‘local’ and immanent

product of methodic procedure rather than a result of ‘pre-existing’ agreement

on ‘matters of fact.’ (Heritage, 1984, p.132)

A key focus of all studies in CA, thus, is upon the way that conversation unfolds

turn-by-turn, rather than propositionally. Participants use prior turns as resource for

the design of utterances, and how utterances themselves delimit the range of possible

following turns. As such, the observation of naturally-occurring conversation allows

for an analyst to provide a description of the interpretative work, the practical

reasoning, being done by the participants regarding what has been said and what,

thus, ought to be said in order to maintain the flow of communication. Interlocutors

do not simply produce an isolated sentence following another. Steve Levinson notes

that participants in conversation analyse and respond to their fellow speakers (1983,

p.321) and, in their response to a prior turn, they display their analysis of it8. This

“proof procedure” (Wooffitt, 1992, p.68) is central to all work in CA, and the now

very substantial body of research emergent of the approach universally emphasises

how, while different levels of “convention” and “context” play decisive roles in the

unfolding of conversation, these are played out step-by-step. Rather than conforming

to pre-defined and pre-agreed sets of institutional-contextual rules, participants in

conversation actually build an ad hoc “architecture of intersubjectivity” (Heritage,

1984, p.254) in the business of talking. It is through this shift of emphasis that silence

becomes less of an anomaly in conversation, and instead just as significant as speech

itself. For Sacks, interpersonal “sense” is situationally rendered in the moment-by-

moment unfolding of real, ordinary conversations. In the same way that Garfinkel

challenges the notion of the “everyday” as a stable category, suggesting that the

everyday is itself constructed within everyday interaction, so too the meaning of any

silence is operationalized within particular, transformable contexts.

The lack of intuition for how a conversation might develop is an ad hoc issue

for interlocutors. This is what makes it communication: if we could predict with

accuracy how a conversation will unfold, then we could all simply prescribe our

activity in any circumstance a priori and effectively mutually orate with no need to

pay attention to each other. But as analysts of speech, we have much the same

problem when inventing examples. How far into an interaction, as Sacks argues,

8 At its simplest level, if speaker B answers a question posed by speaker A, then we can confidently

assert that speaker B has interpreted speaker A’s prior utterance as a question in need of an answer.

could we go? One might not presume that one can gauge the kind of answer a

question receives, but one might reasonably presume an answer will follow a

question. But is even that necessarily a strong presumption? Questions can be

followed by a range acts that do not comfortably categorise as “answers” – rebuttals,

jokes, questions about the question, calls for clarification and so forth.

It follows that, rather than attempt to analyse an utterance, account or

description as a meaningful ‘thing’ in isolation, CA instead situates any given utterance

of any length in the context of its immediate interactive milieu to show how the former

is oriented to the latter, and, thus, generate an understanding of specific meanings

derived from the empirical talk of the participants in interaction themselves, rather than on

some categories of “sense” pre-defined by a researcher. In this sense, while at first

silence may prospectively mean anything, the sequencing of conversation often gives a

different picture. Consider the sequence of talk below:

From Atkinson & Drew (1979, p.52).

1. A: Is there something bothering you or not?

2. (1.0)9

3. A: Yes or no

4. (1.5)

5. A: Eh?

6. B: No.

This exchange illuminates several important points. The first, and hardly

revolutionary, issue is that the question is ultimately followed by an answer. The

statements are an example of adjacency pairing (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974):

two utterances which are (a) adjacent, (b) produced by different speakers and (c)

ordered as a first and second part. Perhaps more pertinently perhaps, B does not

initially provide a response to A’s question (Line 2), causing A to reiterate the

question. This further demonstrates that, first, the rules of adjacency pairing are not

inveterate or mechanical (i.e. a question will not necessarily be followed directly by

an answer); but rather, second, that the repetition of the question indicates that

questioner expects a reply, thus adjacency pairings have a normative character. The

two parts of a pair are “relatively ordered” (Sacks, 1992b, p.521). This ordering is

9 Used here is the standard expression within CA for designating the length of a silence in seconds.

noticeably absent from Austin’s account of situational ambiguity. For Austin,

utterances are taken on their own, for the sake of analytic clarity; but, simply put,

such a move to clarity steps rather too quickly over the fundamental issue of how the

situation of the situational ambiguity is constructed within the discourse itself, as

much as the ambiguity is.

In the case above, we can clearly see how the second pair-part is thus made

“conditionally relevant” by the production of the first (Atkinson & Drew, 1979).

Where such a pair-part is not then produced, it is likely to be “…seen to be absent”

(Sacks, 1992b, p.191), as in this case. Furthermore, the fact that A does not repeat the

question in full, but rather twice reformulates it in progressively truncated form,

demonstrates that he interprets the silence (or non-utterance) not as being resultant

of B having “failed to hear,” which would make relevant a full repetition of the

question, but of an active reluctance to answer. In doing so, speaker A also

contextually assigns those silences to speaker B. The exchange is finally ended by the

provision of a firm answer by B, completing the pair. In short, both participants

visibly carry out situationally-relevant interpretative work during the interaction

regarding the nature of the prior turns (or non-turns).

By examining the sequential unfolding of the conversation, two short periods

during which nothing is said can be seen to be, in-context, highly meaningful

products of a particular speaker. The fact that each act is shaped by context, but also

renews this context with each “turn,” renders interaction yet more unpredictable.

The sands shift for the participants in the interaction with each turn. It is very

difficult to predict what kind of utterance might cause offence, or be deemed

inappropriate without attention to the specific unfolding of real sequences.

Silence and Authority

An example of such a ‘real sequence’ may help to illustrate this point. Consider this

transcript10 of a doctor delivering a diagnosis to a patient with clinical depression.

Doctor: Yes, well [patient’s name], it strikes me that you

have depression. Not severe, but it’s just as well you came

in. I know there are some misperceptions about depression,

it’s not an uncommon illness though and we can sort out

treatment now. And in a minor case like this, there should

be no problem. It’s not a big deal at all.

10 Data excerpted from Miller (2004).

Patient: Well, you’re the doctor!

Initially, this would seem to be nothing other than a straightforward account of what

has been said. If we observe the extant silences within this conversation, however,

our understanding of the interaction is perhaps slightly different11:

1. D: ye:s (.2) well [Patient’s Name] it strikes me that

2. you (.) have depression (.) not severe but it’s

3. just as well you came in

4. (1.0)

5. D: I know there are some (.) misperceptions about depression

6. (.5)

7. D: it’s not an uncommon illness though (.) and we can

8. sort out treatment now

9. (1.5)

10. D: and in a minor case like this (.) there should be no

11. problem

12. (1.0)

13. D: it’s not a big deal at all

14. (.5)

15. P: well (.) you’re the doctor

The patient’s failure to immediately acknowledge (affirmatively or negatively) the

diagnosis (in Line 4) is interpreted by the doctor as the noticeable absence of a turn.

Following this one-second silence, the doctor sets to work on “downgrading” the

hearable import of that diagnosis across a series of turns, further downgrading after

each subsequent silence until the patient finally offers a response. This indicates that

(a) the doctor interprets the patient’s failure to speak within 0.5 to 1.5 seconds of an

utterance are an output of a reluctance to answer, and (b) that this reluctance is an

output of some form of discomfort or dissatisfaction with the diagnosis of depression

itself. In short, these microscopic lapses in activity are of sufficient duration for the

doctor to monitor them as being prefatory to some mode of rejection, and precipitate

further action from him designed to mitigate such an unfavourable or difficult

outcome. As such, the doctor makes use of the contextual resources to achieve an

interpretation of the patient’s (in)actions, moving to alter that context and, thereby,

the possible range of future actions. In this sense, we can observe the inherent

reflexivity of context and action at-work.

11

Note that, herein, D=Doctor and P=Patient.

The constant reflexive shifts in the contexts of silence also bring to light the

dimensions of power within our everyday conversations. A pause of one second may

seem of relatively little consequence, but it are precisely these kinds of pauses that

often prompt us to identify, firstly, whose silence it is (i.e. is the speaker simply

gathering breath, or is their fellow interlocutor actively withholding response?), and

secondly why they are being silent (i.e. have they not heard? Are they resistant? Or

upset? And so forth). This does not, of course, need to return us to a psychologically

intentionalist stance (mentioned previously in the context of Austin’s own account).

In effect, we do not need to, as the next “turn” in any conversation will provide us

with a strong sense of exactly why the respondent is not talking back – they might re-

phrase an initial statement, for example, and in doing so once again re-figure the

conditions of the conversation (as we will, by doing so, imply to the respondent

themselves that they have not understood us). Speech-acts do not simply make sense

“within” context: they are themselves integral and dynamic features of those

contexts.

Implications for Austin

The two key themes central to this chapter – that conversation must be dealt with in

its full sequential context, and that the limits of this context are constructed within

conversation itself – press the philosophy of language to reconsider the abstractions

it has previously made for the sake of clarity.

We will remember that, for Austin, illocutionary intention is fulfilled on the

sole condition that it is recognised: “The performance of an illocutionary act involves

the securing of uptake…” (1962, p.115 [Emphasis Added]). This remains the case in

the examples explored above; but what we additionally notice is that the sequencing

of this “uptake” as a continuous process demonstrates the reflexivity of social

interaction and its contexts. Each participant analyses and engages with the situation

they are in, and in acting provide an interactional contribution that moves the event

forward. What renders silence such an interesting case study is how it illustrates the

way in which speakers simultaneously account for what happens and their reflexive

role in accounting for it.

Arguably, then, the problem for Austin is not his appeal to context per se, but

rather the appeal to the orthodoxy of context. In effect, the orator is standing on a

plinth, rather than within the shifting sands of real communication; and (as

rhetoricians as far back as Gorgias in the 5th century BCE will tell us) presuming a

fixed audience is very bad speaking, illocutionary or not. As such, the problem could

well be raised for Austin’s examples of both speech and non-speech, not that they are

invented, but that they are not inventive. In sum, thus, if we want to produce a strong

and systematic philosophy of the form and function of silence within ordinary

language, then we may need to take stronger account of the flexibility and mobility

of local contexts, and the manner in which silence itself is integrated into, and

rendered meaningful within, sequences of real speech-acts.

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