A pragmatic study of conversational silence in Harold Pinter's the birthday party

Abstract EN

The present study investigates, pragmatically, Pinter's employment of conversational silence in his selected play, namely (The Birthday Party).

Moreover, it aims at identifying the forms of silence that manifest conversational silence, specifying the mainly breached Grice's maxims, finding out the most common illocutionary force, manifesting the performed politeness strategies, and pinpointing the most common functions of conversational silence used in the selected play.

For the sake of analysing the data, this study develops a model of analysis.

Depending on the model, a qualitative and quantitative analysis is conducted for investigating the forms of silence that manifest conversational silence, the pragmatic strategies, and the functions.

Based on the data analysis, conclusions are drawn.

The most crucial of which are that the manifestation of conversational silence depends fundamentally on three forms of silence, i.

e.

interactive, internal, and extended silence with illocutionary force, which occur simultaneously in conversation, and, therefore, the forms used are equally.