34.642, FYI: Silences across Languages and Cultures; Multilingual and transcultural Silences (working titles)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-642. Wed Feb 22 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.642, FYI: Silences across Languages and Cultures; Multilingual and transcultural Silences (working titles)

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Date: 
From: Michal Ephratt [mephratt at research.haifa.ac.il]
Subject: Silences across Languages and Cultures; Multilingual and transcultural Silences (working titles)


The proposed edited volume is supposed to be a platform for scholarly
exchange focusing on silence in its own right as it emerges across
languages and cultures. Its broad and profound in-depth scope taken up
by prominent scholars working in this field will ensure valuable
contributions.

Rationale and aim: Silence does not emerge as a uniform notion. The
various forms of silence intuitively encountered and experienced in
daily life and likewise the silences investigated in academia fall, in
fact, into different phenomena and notions. The word “silence” in
English, for instance, as well as in other languages, stands for
varied concepts, such as:

- the absence of sounds,
- the absence of [expected] speech,
- pauses grounding and demarcating words or music notes,
- the unsaid,
- the exclusion of individuals or groups from (self)expression,
- withholding one’s speech,
- reticence and mutism.

Silence as stillness is external to interaction. Within interaction we
encounter organisational and collective silences, and also personal
silences and intersubjective ones. There are unintentional silences
such as symptomatic silences, and intentional silences. Intentional
silences serve many functions, playing a central role in many
intersubjective and cultural contexts and disciplines (for example,
the spiral of silence-communication model; one- or two-minute-silence
as a cultural rite; the right to silence in legal practice, and the
Silence of the Lambs – as in film-arts and cultural studies).
Silence can also take on visual forms such as a blank page or a poker
face. On top of these, all the above sorts of silences can stand as
the focal point of artwork such as literature, movies, videoart and
plays, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture. In
addition, examined from the semiotic signified-content realm, silences
in language, too, emerge in various forms such as semantic and
syntactic ellipsis, lexical voids, taboo, and the zero sign. Many
intentional silences are found to iconise internal and external
reality, personal and collective experiences – examples being void,
absence, loss, and trauma.
The proposed volume Silences across languages and cultures (working
title) is aimed at a wide circle of readers and wishes to accommodate
diverse publications of studies extending the borders of customary
single discipline publications.

List of possible topics, but not limited to:
- Universal features of silence across languages and across cultures
- Linguistic modes of verbal silences
- Silence and verbal / visual iconicity
- Rites of silence
- Silences across time
- Silence as power
- Silence and intimacy
- Silence and education
- Silence and aesthetics (literature, film, media (modalities), art
etc.)

Intended addressees
The fascination about silence is that from an academic perspective it
is relevant and even central to many disciplines and fields (major
examples being anthropology and sociology, cultural studies,
linguistics, cognitive sciences, communication and communication
disorders, education, genetics, history, theology, iconicity, law,
literature and arts, management marketing and economics, music,
philosophy, political affairs, psychology, and semiotics). But from a
lay perspective it touches on spheres of everyday life such as
infant-parent bonding, the stillness of the night, the silence of the
dead, intimate silence etc. Silence touching on every possible niche
in daily life as well as in academia per se attracts a broad
readership. It is, however, not only the interdisciplinary nature of
the edited volume and a simple merging of two single disciplines we
want to achieve but instead to bring together several disciplines by
combining and incorporating studies on silences both multilingually
and transculturally.

Any language and any sub-linguistic field may be relevant if it looks
at silences across Languages and Cultures.

Please send your abstract to Wolfgang.Stadler at uibk.ac.at and
mephratt at research.haifa.ac.il

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Applied Linguistics
                     Clinical Linguistics
                     Cognitive Science
                     Computational Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Forensic Linguistics
                     General Linguistics
                     Genetic Classification
                     Historical Linguistics
                     History of Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition
                     Language Documentation
                     Lexicography
                     Ling & Literature
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Morphology
                     Philosophy of Language
                     Phonetics
                     Phonology
                     Pragmatics
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Semantics
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Syntax
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics
                     Translation
                     Typology




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