Silence

Dennis Kurzon
Table of contents

The study of silence from a linguistic, and especially a pragmatic, perspective is a recent phenomenon (see section 2. below). Earlier, silence was discussed from a philosophical and even mystical point of view. We may cite Max Picard’s World of Silence (1948), and of course Ludwig Wittgenstein’s well-known aphorism at the end of his Tractatus (1995: 74): “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (for further examples, see Kurzon 2013a).

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