Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse

Melani Schröter is Associate Professor in German Linguistics at the University of Reading, UK, and the author of Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse (2013). Her research interests include political discourse analysis, silence and absence in discourse and communication, comparative analyses of European migration discourses, and discourses of resistance.  Charlotte Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sussex, UK, and Editor of CADAAD Journal. Her research specialisms include impoliteness implicatures, and discourses of migration, and she has a longstanding interest in methodological issues.

“The studies presented in this book provide meaningful results and show relevant empirical routes into the study of absence and silence in discourse, thus filling in an important gap in literature.” (Fernanda Andrioli, Language in Society, Vol. 48 (3), June, 2019)

• 1 Introduction; Melani Schröter and Charlotte Taylor.- Part I Comparison as Means to Identify Silence and Absence.- 2 Not for Twitter: Migration as a Silenced Topic in the Spanish General Election; Manuel Alcántara-Plá and Ana Ruiz-Sánchez.- 3 Absence in Visual Narratives: The Story of Iran and Pakistan across Time; Sameera Durrani.- 4 Intimations of ‘Spring’? What Got Said and What Didn’t Get Said about the Start of the Middle Eastern/North African Uprisings: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Study of a Historical Event ; Alan Partington. - 5 Cross-media Studies as a Method to Uncover Patterns of Silence and Linguistic Discrimination of Sexual Minorities in Ugandan Print Media; Cecilia Strand.- 6 Critically Illuminating Relevant Absences in Public Sphere Arguments via Digital Mining of Their Weblinks: A Software-based Pedagogy; Kieran O’Halloran.- 7 Silence and Absence in Chinese Smog Discourses; Jiayi Wang and Dániel Z. Kádár.- Part II Exploring Means that Produce Silence and Absence.-8 Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Identifying Meaningful Absences in Discourse; Patricia von Münchow.- 9 What’s Not in a Frame? Analysis of Media Representations of the Environmental Refugee; Nina Venkataraman.- 10 A Discourse Analysis of Absence in Nigerian News Media; Taiwo Oluwaseun Ehineni. - Part III Analysing Surface Indicators of Silence and Absence. - 11 What the f#@$!: Policing and Performing the Unmentionable in the News; Crispin Thurlow and Jamie Moshin.- 12 The Use of No Comment by Suspects in Police Interviews; Joanna Garbutt.- 13 Conspicuous by Presence: The Empty Signifier ‘Interdisciplinarity’ and the Representation of Absence; Dorte Madsen