A pragmatic vision of silence in current Spanish

Abstract

Silence is a discursive element little investigated in pragmatics. It has communicative value, but its functions are yet to be determined in many contexts. There are typological, methodological and sociocultural reasons that explain the scant attention received by these signs in orality (Méndez and Camargo, 2015a). To better understand these reasons, it is necessary to know the linguistic studies from the 50s of the last 20th century, where the phenomenon began to be treated, until today. This paper presents the evolution of the study of silence in linguistics in recent decades. It starts from the interdisciplinary position adopted in the first studies until arriving at the most recent pragmatic investigations and the corpus and multimodal studies of today. All this with a fundamental objective: to know the point at which studies are today and to trace the possible lines of research for the future.