Silence is talk: conversational silence in Australian Aboriginal talk-in-interaction

Abstract

This article presents a ConversationAnalytic study of silences in talk recorded in remote Aboriginal communities, andcompares the length, distribution and interactional management of such silences with what we know about themin Anglo-Australian and American talk. Ethnographic studies of Australian Aboriginal discourse have frequently claimed that Australian Aboriginal people are comfortable with long periods of silence. While our findings support this notion, the micro level of analysis we are able to apply to our data here allows for a more fine-grained understanding of what it means to tolerate longer silences in the context of Aboriginal conversation.