Conversational Silence in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party: A Pragmatic Perspective

This research offers a contemporary pragmatic approach toward the analysis of conversational silence in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and fills the void in the analysis of silence as a complex Speech Act in drama. It considers different types of silence and answers the question of whether or not they obey or break Grice’s maxims with regard to dialogue interactions. In extending prior work, this paper aims to explore various aspects of silence as a strategic act that has dramatic performative effects, explore their politeness effects in detail, and explore the kind of situations in which the act of silence is likely to occur. This research employs both qualitative and quantitative analysis with an additional use of text mining and statistical tools for data visualization. It is thus suggested that silence in The Birthday Party has other functions that are more strategic, as it is here indicated: power, in so far as it may be read as the interlocutor’s power off and as a way of turning down or dodging an offer; face, as it has been shown, in so far as it entails the deployment of three different types of silence, namely: internal, interactive, and turn-const Such findings enhance the audience’s understanding of Pinter’s dramatic and pragmatic approach to silence and thus enrich current theoretical analysis of pragmatic speech acts on the stage