ABSTRACT
What silence is, what it means, and how people use it constitute questions that have long occupied many scholars; yet, no one seems to have definitively answered them. In fact, in the past two decades, scholars from different cultures,1 various disciplines,2 and numerous paradigmatic perspectives3 have responded to Johannesen’s (1974) call for more systematic research on silence and found themselves increasingly in opposition to one another over the nature of silence. This dialogue has resulted in a body of literature that offers much conflicting information on the definitions, values, and uses of silence.
