Things Left Unsaid: Linguistic Analysis of Silences found in Three Novels by Thomas Hardy

Silence plays an integral role in our lives. It is present in everyday conversations, as both the starting and the ending point of each of our utterances. Although they seem markedly different, speech and silence operate together in delivering the speaker’s message and may convey as powerful a message as they may also present a lack thereof. Because silence is oftentimes considered to be ‘other’ than speech, it has scarcely been the focus of linguistic research. However, when studied, silences are usually analyzed in transcripts of spontaneous speech, this thesis deals with the silences in written dialogues from three Thomas Hardy’s novels – Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd. These novels were chosen because, although they are seminal works of the Victorian age, they are far less analyzed then say, novels by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Seeing that in novels, silence is the key to the relationships between characters, but also a tool to express various emotional states. The quotes were extracted by close reading, rather than by the use of a corpus, seeing that written silences are highly contextual. The extracted silences, which can be found in the appendix, are analyzed using typologies by Ephratt, Kurzon and Jensen, where the authors’ definitions are applicable. These typologies deal with different functions of silence, such as the referential function, the emotive function, the conative function, the linking function, the judgmental function and many more. Various quotes extracted from the novels are also analyzed with regards to the sociocultural principles of the Victorian age, with special emphasis put on relationships between dominant and subordinate speakers, as well as the position of women and the expectations and ideologies put on them by society, such as coyness, propriety, domesticity, and piousness reflected in the ideology of ‘the angel in the house’