• ISSN: 2382-6282 (Print); 2972-3108 (Online)
    • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Lang. Lit. Linguist.
    • Frequency: Bimonthly
    • DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL
    • Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Jason Miin-Hwa Lim
    • Managing Editor:  Jennifer X. Zeng
    • Indexed by:   CNKI, Google Scholar, Crossref,
    • E-mail: ijlll_Editor@126.com
IJLLL 2019 Vol.5(3): 186-191 ISSN: 2382-6282
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2019.5.3.224

Eloquent Silence: A Study of Communicative Instances in Arundhati Roy‘s The God of Small Things

Madhura Sen

Abstract—Silence is one of the distinguishing features of human speech and has been an interesting object of study across disciplines. Early structural linguistics focused on isolated instances of language devoid of contextual information where silence did not feature at all. Conversation Analysts focused on silence but failed to accommodate meaning into it. With the ‘linguistic turn’ in the early Twentieth century, the discipline of Philosophy addressed silence in more ways than one. In this paper instances of absence of verbal language which consciously include both ‘silence’ and ‘gestures’ in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things have been studied closely. This paper aims to argue that ‘silence’, though apparently devoid of a form, functions as successful communicative instances emerging as eloquent and revealing different forms of function depending on the situation and relationship between interlocutors.

Index Terms—Communication, eloquent silence, gestures, silence.

Madhura Sen is with University of Calcutta, India (e-mail: senmadhura@gmail.com).

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Cite: Madhura Sen, "Eloquent Silence: A Study of Communicative Instances in Arundhati Roy‘s The God of Small Things," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 186-191, 2019.

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