The Pragmatics of Silence: A Comparative Study of Communicative Absence in Stephenson, Chiazor-Enenmor, and Braithwaite's Selected Works

Abstract

This paper looks at the pragmatics of silence as a deliberate communicative strategy by a few characters going through different stages of domestic violence in these three contemporary works: Shelagh Stephenson’s Five Kinds of Silence, Ndidi Chiazor-Enenmor’s If They Tell the Story, and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer. Silence in domestic violence has often been dismissed as an act of acquiescence or docility. However, through the lens of pragmatism and iceberg theories, this paper posits silence as a sophisticated and eloquent speech act that performs specific functions within domestic and social dynamics. This study categorises the silences in these texts into three functional types: protective, performative, and resistant. The analysis reveals that across different cultural contexts, silence serves as a sophisticated tool for navigating trauma, enforcing complicity, and reclaiming agency in environments where verbal expression is either dangerous or insufficient. The paper recommends the application of silence as unspoken speech in human communication that is therapeutic/strategic in traumatic situations of domestic violence.