Michael B. Buchholz, Oliver Ehmer, Christopher Mahlstedt, Stefan Pfänder, and Elke Schumann

Introduction

Social scientists, linguists, psychologists gather a lot of private experience of their own and other people’s behavior. Sometimes you observe others talking together and you can’t help it, there is this strong feeling that they are talking together and many topics relevant at the time of their talking are being omitted. You have no proof for it, it’s just a feeling. You know this is a public place and people observe that they are observed, what Goffman termed “mutual monitoring” (Goffman 1963). This is a relatively simple case of “communicative absence”. A certain topic is not talked about in the presence of foreigners.

Goffman described another type of “communicative absence” under the heading “Treatment of the absence”:

(Goffman, 1959/2008, p. 111)

People wear their public masks and even in narrow friendships, Goffman muses, friends hold certain opinions about each other back in most circumstances. And in others they utter them freely.

There are further types of communicative absence. When therapists see a patient for the first time, they expect moments of silence to happen, the process will bring things to light. The situation changes again when therapists interview a couple. Here one is in a different observer position; you can observe them talking (in front of you). More often than not there is this pervasive feeling that they talk and in the same move they silence the most relevant things; although they seem to know what they silence and share this knowledge. That they cannot address it is one of the reasons they seek support.

It is this type of situation that we want to study. Our material is a video record of a couple demanding therapy. They were given the task to talk in front of a camera about “what are our most relevant problems at the time”. They had to fulfill the task before, and again after, treatment.¹ Here we analyze the first tape only.

We will proceed in the following way: first, we will give a short reminder of how “noticeable absences” are theorized in the tradition of conversation analysis (CA) in order to contextualize the following analysis; second, we will analyze some scenarios directed to the couple’s verbal level; third, a more fine-grained linguistic analysis is directed (a) to the vocal level by using a new method of musicalization of how relevant aspects are spoken and (b) to the embodied aspects of the couple’s conversation; fourth, we will present an integration of these views; and fifth, we will propose some theoretical conclusions and types of silence and silencing.

Noticeable absence as silenced talk

Viewing the tape several times we were initially touched by an undefinable impression that this couple was not really in touch with each other. It took some time until we could define the problem methodologically. The work of Pietikäinen (2018) shows, in subtly detailed study of a couple’s interactions, that there are silences that speak. Is it possible to turn this around? Is there talk that silences? And how could it be detected?

We will start with some thoughts about membership categorization. Harvey Sacks in his second lecture discusses the smallest narrative: “The baby cried. The mother picked it up”, and shows how nearly every listener assumes that mother and baby are members of one category “family”. But, then, he makes a serious thought experiment:

(Sacks & Jefferson, 1992/1995, p. 254)

Membership categorization might be erroneous and you cannot distinguish both cases – if the woman is a mother that is entitled to take the baby or not – easily from one another. The correction of membership categorization makes the event, absences become noticed.

Furthermore, Sacks is deeply engaged in the topic of “seeing lies” (p. 114). We take another example how Sacks described how people deal with everyday lies:

(Sacks & Jefferson, 1992/1995, p. 556)

So the special correction of the subset membership makes the lie an event.

In order to focus on activities which are not going to happen, we draw on the term “noticeable absence”. This term refers to the fact that in a given sequential context some kind of next action is expected but not realized. Due to the participants’ expectations, this creates a recognizable absence of the not-realized action. An observer can notice that something relevant is absent. The examples Sacks delivers are as follows:

(Sacks & Jefferson, 1992/1995, vol 1, p. 31)

The analytical advantage of “noticable absence” is thus to deal with phenomena that are “not present” or “not realized” in an interaction. The tricky methodological problem is designed by Sacks in the following way:

The ‘noticeably absent’ thing is very, very important and it will come up again and again. If you’re going to make a statement which proposes that something is absent, then you can’t in any serious way propose that X is absent unless you have some way of discriminating the absence of X from the assertable absence of millions of things, or ten things that anybody could name. In order to make a non-trivial assertion that X is absent, you have to have some way of showing that a statement, ‘X is absent,’ is different from some statement, ‘Y is absent,’ where Y may also be absent. For example, I might say ‘There is no greeting in this conversation’ and somebody else might say ‘Well, there is no suicide threat, either, so what is it that makes your statement that there was no greeting something other than just something you’re saying?’ Now one way to go about dealing with making non-trivial statements about absences is to have some way to say that the absence is also an event. That is to say, for only some class of things will it be the case that you can say that X is absent by virtue of the fact that the absence of X is a noticeable feature of what happened. And one criterion for its noticeable status is that people say about it, ‘X is absent.’

(Sacks & Jefferson, 1992/1995, p. 35)

Another type of noticeable absence may appear in the context of quoting (Pomerantz 1984), e.g. two working colleagues talk about their boss. Fred tells Paul how the boss recently told Fred how incompetent Fred is. Quoting self-directed foreign critical remarks of somebody else is a risky endeavor; the risk is that the listener – Paul – might silently agree. In order to avoid this impression Paul is expected to take a stance. If not, Paul’s silence is interpreted as agreement to the boss’s opinion. A similar type is enacted when Fred reports a negative statement of the boss about Paul. Then, Fred is expected to discredit the boss and his opinion of Paul. If Fred however produces a noticeable absence or “silence”, however, the relationship is at risk. Imagine now a couple, Peter and Mary, quoting a third party’s opinion about their relationship – without taking a stance. This is the type of silencing we want to deal with.

How are noticeable absences made noticeable events? First, they might be recognized and addressed by participants themselves. Second, they have “relevance for other conversations” (as Sacks wrote, above). Third, they indicate relevance for the relational status participants assign to each other. Fourth, they exert a devastating impact, followed by utterances of emotional disturbance or further silence.

The accuse-and-defense scenario

From the first 90 seconds of the video with Peter and Mary we learn that they have lived together for 16 years without having talked very much about relevant things. Peter feels too controlled by Mary. Contributing to the task to talk about “most relevant” problems he tells an example of the “lemon pie” he lately ate, telling Mary that he liked it. She is “sour” about this. She often baked a lemon pie and Peter never liked it, because the lemon pie tastes sour. This recent lemon pie was baked by Sabine, no, by Jacob, he corrects himself. Mary complains that Peter often obeys what others advise him to do or how things are; it is she who wishes to be his “counselor”. She mocks him, quoting what his father or his mother have said to him, introducing his objections – in her quotation – by the generic “yes-but-no” phrase-introduction. She suffers from feeling without influence, but her attacks make him build up stronger walls of defense, which stirs up her attacks. Thus, both are caught in a circular pattern. Here is a transcript segment following the first 90 seconds:

Segment (1)

32 Mary: I don’t want to control you

33 what I what I always (2.1)

34 what I always intend is ehm (0.7)

35 just that you take me as someone giving you advice for once

36 and that is a feeling I do not have

37 (1.0)

38 I have the feeling that uhm

39 that you listen more (0.7) to uhm (.) the advice of other people

40 when you eventually make a decision

41 whether or not to do something (0.5)

42 you listen more to the decisions of those other people

43 than to the advice I gave you

44 because after all it is exactly the same as what I told you but

45 in the thir\ n_n when you inform me saying

46 yes but Felix has suggested that (0.4)

47 no but my daddy has said that

48 no mom has suggested

49 Peter: I don’t listen to my dad

50 Mary: okay well your mother

51 Peter: < < exhaling loudly>h°> laughing>hehe>> (0.7) °hh eh

52 (2.6)

Accuse by list-colligation…

In lines 44–48 we observe Mary projecting a “list-in-progress” (Jefferson, 2017, p. 333). As Jefferson observed, three-part lists are generally considered to be sufficient in order to convey generality. Mary does not list objects or names; she lists quotations with the common denominator that Peter lent his ears to these speakers. Felix, Daddy, and Mama must not necessarily be members of the same class of persons; their belonging together on this list is simply due to the fact that it is Peter who makes them (in Mary’s view) “belong together”. Jefferson termed this phenomenon “colligation”:

(Jefferson 2017, p. 333, capitals and italics by Jefferson)

Mary’s list has, as Selting (2004) described, a three-part structure. In lines 38–45 Mary projects her list, then the single list elements follow (lines 46–48); the closure component is lacking as Peter repairs the last element. What follows is a pause and a change to another focus.

The function of this listing is to prove that Peter’s bonds to these figures in his life are more influential on his conduct than is Mary’s influence. The list appears sequentially after the formulation of a claim (“you listen more to the decisions of these other persons than to pieces of advice I gave you”); the list has the status of presenting evidence for her claim by quoting Peter’s own words (Selting 2004, 2007). As has been observed, quotations are used when a higher degree of genuineness or authenticity is warranted (Bergmann 1987).

However, the quotations (lines 46–48) are incomplete. It is relevant that Peter is quoted as quoting Felix, Daddy, or Mama; but what these persons said need not to be mentioned. It is silenced. But one can assume that both know the unspoken quotes.

… defense by disassembly

Peter behaves like a good lawyer who dismembers the list. By showing that at least one list-item has no justified place on the list, a shadow falls on the other items; the whole list might collapse. Mary rapidly replaces the removed list-item “father” by “okay well your mother”. Peter can doubt single list-items just because they are not members of a class, but they are colligated on one list. The colligation makes the list an object of the couple’s common negotiations.

Why negotiations here at all? One speculative answer might be that Mary and Peter perform a court-scenario: Mary in the role of prosecutor, Peter in the role of defendant and lawyer. Who might be the judge? The answer could be: the jury-audience represented by the camera which takes the role of a silent member. The “judge” should not speak, because if he does, then one of them would be declared “guilty” and the relationship is at risk. This little speculation throws some light on the enormous burdens on a therapist’s shoulders when working with such a couple.

Jefferson describes that lists are often closed by what she terms a “General List Completer” (GLC). GLCs indicate that many more items could be found but that they need not be specified here. Thus, lists-in-progress are often closed by fragments like “or whatever” or similar phrases. Selting (2007, p. 504) observed,

However, Pietikäinen (2018) found that in quarreling couples, things often run differently; questions are not responded to in due time, silence arises, and then a counter-question follows, but no response. Listing completion here takes another prosody, as analyzed by Selting (2007).

Musicalization – Mary’s voice in producing and closing the list

We used a new method of “musicalization” invented by Christopher Mahlstedt who is a fully trained musician. This method aims to make visible how the couple mutually adjusts to each other in terms of pitch and rhythm (Gregory, Webster & Huang, 1993; Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein et al., 2001). The method unfolds in four steps: first, writing down, like a composer, the melody and rhythm of a spoken utterance; second, playing the documented notation with an instrument, like, for example, a saxophone; third, parallel playing of the original spoken audio sound and saxophone accompaniment; fourth, presenting the record in the group of analysts for correction or confirmation.

In this way, listening to the prosody of each of Mary’s list elements we hear a repeating sequence of pitches slightly variated. The following handmade transcription² can make it hearable again, in a certain sense: “However, who tries to adopt music by reading a score reads something into it by sounding it out” (de La Motte-Haber, 1985, p. 14) (see Figure 17.1).

First of all, we look at the three quotations-without-quoting by Mary (bars 1–3). They are spoken with a loud voice in a sixteenth-note rhythm, beginning with a stretched, slightly rising pitch (c#’–d’) in the beginning and ending harshly with two accented eight notes one octave lower (d). The wide ambitus of the first two phrases (d’–d) as well as the inner structure of the intervals provide attention and tension: Mary, imitating Peter when pointing to the persons Peter is referring to, does this by an upwards directed chromatic (B♭–c’) – within the given pitches this can be heard as a minor seventh. Both phrases end by a tritone (g#–d), a very dissonant sounding interval. The third phrase, starting a half note lower on a c’–c#’ is shorter, the ambitus is reduced to a sixth and it ends by a fourth from b–e.

Since our hearing is primed by musical and linguistic experience we compare endings with cadences – a formal gestalt that typically appears at the end of a piece of music or a sentence. But Mary’s tensed and raised voice repeats the melodic citation; she rather seems to cry. The pauses between the musical gestalts “quote” by silent insertion what Peter’s loyalties (Felix, Daddy, Mother) are quoted to have said, making them “noticeable absent”; the repetitive gestalt suggests continuation. One hears the dissonance in her voice and the pauses are framed as “noticeable absence”. In this sense the reduced contour of the third list-item with the non-dissonant ending is alluding and can be heard as a “musical” GLC. Thus, a paradoxon is created – the musical gestalt of the contours is “closed, conclusive, assertive, reinforcing on the other” (Papoušek, Papoušek, & Symmes, 1991, p. 435) but the syntactic ending, the relative clause, is left open. Does Peter fill the gaps Mary produced? And if so, will he now take a stance instead?

With a slight laid-back feel, Peter joins in, changing the rhythmic pattern by slowing down to eighth-note triplets and intonating the pitches c#, d#, g#, and c#, as if picking up Mary’s “riff” and displaying it now very simply, as a cadence movement from I to V to I. Regarding this rhythmic shift and the artificial sound of his voice, saying “(auf) mein PApa hör_ch nich” (I don’t listen to my dad), his alterations must be heard as disaffiliative (cf. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, p. 33). Further analyses indicate confirmation.

We conclude that this is a noticeable absence, again. Further analyses confirm this conclusion: Whereas the beginning of his phrase (the tone c#) is in line with the starting pitch of the third list-item, indicating a “tuning-in” (Gregory, Webster, & Huang, 1993, p. 200) with the musical gestalt of that part of the list, the d# sets a contrast to the prior dominance of the ds, and the upward motion of a fourth (d#–g#) sounding like an exaggeration to the described tonal pointing devices confirm the impression that Peter hardly takes serious what Mary is saying.

Mary grasping up the sixteenth-note pattern again and confirming Peter’s other-repair “na gut deine MUTter” (okay well your mother) intonates now a f# that is a fourth higher than Peter’s c# – a reversed fourth and now within the turn-taking. Thus, Mary’s uptake of Peter’s repair sounds clearly downgraded in relevance (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, p. 163); the melodic frame of an octave has flattened almost to a prime, the volume of her voice is mezzo piano. The two words “na gut” (okay well) confirm the prosodic impression of making irrelevant relevance: that it doesn’t matter who Peter is listening to; the musical gestalt shows little differences in terms of rhythm and tonality. Peter laughs out loud, celebrating a triumph over his father, while Mary with resignation points to his mother. Then, in a lower volume but a higher pitch, he grindingly hits a d’; adding harmonies to a passage where a false cadence in f# is hearable. Peter suddenly hesitates and forms an “äh”, tonally shaped in a downward movement of a minor third and not sounding amused anymore. All three – Mary, Peter’s now absent mother, and Peter – pause from being in silence with each other.

What can be concluded from this? The observation of a paradox can be confirmed when we refer this analysis to a recent CA-theory of intersubjectivity (Stevanovic & Koski, 2018). Accepting a pre-announcement of a quotation which does not follow can be understood as epistemic reference to a common knowledge store. Things must not be spoken out loud as both know what is meant. However, the affective order as documented in the musical analysis of prosody does not confirm a co-construction of utterances. And, more: Casually, Peter joins in, changing the rhythmic pattern by slowing down to eighth-note triplets and intonating the pitches c#, d#, g# and c#, as picking up Mary’s “riff” and displaying it now very simply, as a cadence movement from I to V to I. Regarding this rhythmic shift and the artificial sound of his voice, saying “(auf) mein PApa hör_ch nich” (I don’t listen to my dad), his repairs must be heard as disaffiliative (cf. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, p. 33). Peter is the one who decides – a deontic order without taking a stance. The three orders of intersubjectivity Stevanovic & Koski (2018) described are not well aligned; they are in disharmony.

Invisible loyalties

By analyzing list colligation and list disassembly practices in this couple’s conflict we detect practices of silencing. One element of the list is disassembled and the others get out of sight. In what follows we see other practices of silence and silencing.

In a “token-as-a-type” format the couple chooses the lemon pie in order to perform the therapeutic task to talk about their actual problems. The lemon-pie episode is presented as “typical” for the kind of conflicts this couple discusses. Some background is explored in the couple’s conversation which we want to analyze now.

Mary’s baking of a lemon pie is hardly positively responded to by Peter, but Mary accuses Peter of liking the lemon pie made by Sabine. Mary argues about why she mentioned Sabine, because Peter had formerly quoted her opinion about Mary’s and Peter’s relationship:

Segment (2)

90 Mary: and besides it was Sabine,

91 (3.6)

92 because you know Sabine said that we should better split up

93 (0.5)

94 Peter: no that is not what Sabine said

95 Sabine said that I uhm (1.2)

96 that that (1.0) it uhm (2.6)

97 yes well alright maybe <<aspirated>> she did say it

98 Mary: it’s what you said to me

99 Peter: uhm she did not say that we should split up=

100 =that perhaps another kind of woman would be better for me

101 (3.4)

((Mary forcefully pushing the backs of her hands down onto her knees and then openingher palms upwards, as if saying: “That’s what I said”))

102 Mary: that’s hurting me

103 (0.6)

104 yeah as close as Sabine is to you

105 because for such a long time

106 Peter: [((clearing throat))]

107 Mary: she took care of you when you were a child

108 Peter: [((clearing throat))]

109 (0.9)

110 Mary: and and you do very much value her like a mother

111 Peter: uhm_uhm

Undoubtedly, Sabine’s recommendation to separate or that another woman “would be better” for Peter have high relevance for the relationship. This recommendation comes as indirect quotation, a format which increases the relevance (in the sense that “Sabine says…”) and decreases the relevance (in the sense that “it’s only Sabine saying such things…”). Peter retells these quotations with self-interruptions, hesitation markers, pauses and word-repetitions, and changes in speech rate. With fast speech-rate he admits Sabine’s words that “perhaps another kind of woman would be better for me”.

His speaking slowly is suddenly accelerated when he corrects what Mary reported he had told her (line 94) about Sabine’s utterance. His left hand rubs the top of his nose between his eyes during the pause of 2.5 sec (line 94), a gesture displaying the brooding thinker (see Figure 17.2).

Gesture, self-interruptions and pauses, rapid changes of speech rate, and rapid changes of turning voice up–down give the impression that he is making a confession. The whole configuration of Mary’s first quotation of what Sabine had said is quickly corrected; his hesitations while brooding on what Sabine had “really said” while Mary reminds him that he himself has told this to her; his fast repair; and finally, what Sabine had said, reminds us of a well-described pattern:

(Frank 2005, p. 353)

We do not say that Peter is lying. It is the consumption of time, a high degree of cognitive complexity in Peter’s utterance indicated by self-repair and hesitation, and there is the gestural quotation of the brooding thinker. Format and content of his utterance and gesture present a lot of cognitive and emotional complexity for Mary which contributes to the pause of 3.4 sec (line 103) now following. It is a pause in words, not in gesturing.

In this pause she makes a gesture with both hands. These are held in her lap, then taken up while the head nods, turned outside, and then allowed to fall back in her lap. We show the sequence in Figures 17.3, 17.4, and 17.5.

Figure 17.3 Start of the gesture, hands on the left knee, gaze into emptiness, strike of a gesture uprising and outside.

Figure 17.4 The apex of the gesture, hands open, head bowed, and gaze downwards. Depressed face.

Figure 17.5 The refraction phase of the gesture: return to start.

When we try to translate this gesture into words it seemed to be equivalent to “This is what I said”. Mary receives a negative message from Peter’s quotations from Sabine and she has the paradoxical satisfaction of having understood everything in the right way. However, this satisfaction cannot and does not please her.

There is more than epistemic complexity to cope with. The affective complexity is expressed in Mary’s response that she feels hurt. Then follows a remark acknowledging Peter’s loyalty bonds to Sabine who cared for him when he was a child and who seems to have taken a place in his emotional household like a mother, as Mary, uncontradicted, formulates. He agrees. What comes into sight here has been termed “invisible loyalties” (Boszormenyi-Nagy 1973) by couple therapists. Peter is seen to be loyal to Sabine like a son to a mother. This loyalty bond is in conflict with his loyalty to Mary. Via quotations Sabine is presented as a “counselor” in Peter’s relationship to Mary, while Mary herself has claimed to be respected as “counselor” by Peter. To enjoy Sabine’s lemon pie might be heard by Mary as Peter downgrading his loyalty bonds to her as compared to those with Sabine. The lemon pie seems to symbolize this loyalty conflict.

We want to describe some of the cognitive, affective, and loyalty complexities this couple has to deal with. We assume that high-complexity events in conversation have a potential to cause pauses. These pauses grant some time to think over what has been said and what has been going on. And, what has not been said.

Using quotations as conversational tools (Ehmer 2011) adds an animating dimension to symbolic talk. Direct quotations (Bergmann 1987) make a higher claim of authenticity, they come with a subtext like “this is what was really said”. They are part of a technique of information management aiming to ensure the content and source of the information given. This is part of Peter’s enactment when searching for the “true version” of what Sabine had really said. Search for the truth is in itself considered to be a valuable activity; the actor can claim that his efforts make him a respectable person. Frank (2005) points out that just this positive side-effect of struggling for the “true quotation” can be used to cover other topics of relevance. In this segment the quotations are spelled out, efforts are made to quote correctly, but Peter does not take a stance to the quotations of Sabine. This is what makes a noticeable absence a noticeable event. We refer to two theoretical offers taken from CA-traditions to make this more understandable.

The analysis of the couple’s conversation can be sharpened by our “ability to see in tandem with the expansion of our theories”, as we quoted Collins at the beginning of this chapter. Thus, this is a reminder of Goffman (1981).

A speaker is a term for a social role complemented by a listener. But speaker can be differentiated by three analytical roles which are described by Goffman in the following way:

It is necessary now to look at the remaining element of the conversational paradigm, the notion of speaker.

In canonical talk, one of the two participants moves his lips up and down to the accompaniment of his own facial (and somewhat bodily) gesticulations; and words can be heard issuing from the locus of his mouth. He is the sounding box in use … He is functioning as an ‘animator’. Animator and recipient are part of the same level and mode of analysis, two terms cut from the same cloth, not social roles in the full sense so much as functional nodes in a communication system.

But, of course, when one uses the term ‘speaker’, one very often beclouds the issue, having additional things in mind, this being one reason why ‘animator’ cannot comfortably be termed a social role, merely an analytic one.

Sometimes one has in mind that there is an ‘author’ of the words that are heard, that is, someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded.

Sometimes one has in mind that a ‘principal’ (in the legislative sense) is involved, that is, someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is committed to what the words say.

(Goffman, 1981, p. 144)

With these preparations we can return to the couple’s conversation.

Using the distinction of animator, author, and principal we can see in the following segment what is covered by Peter’s intensified search for the truth of Sabine’s quotations. He does not commit himself as a principal “to what the words say”. What is silenced is his positioning to Sabine’s words quoted in full truth.

In many comparable cases of non-committing in everyday talk, we are accustomed to assume that the listener is sure of the prior speaker’s commitment. However, this is not the case in our example. Mary nowhere makes an explicit attempt to find out Peter’s position towards Sabine’s so-directly presented opinion. Peter silences by not taking a stance; Mary silences by not challenging Peter’s stance. Both silence while talking.

Musicalization – what hurts Mary?

We answer this question by starting with Mary’s words in line 102: “°that’s hurting me”. Here is the prosody of Mary’s part after the pause in line 101 (see Figure 17.6).

Figure 17.6 Musicalization of Mary’s complaint: “and that is hurting me”.

Mary reacts slowly, pointing out without clear time, in chromatically ascending triplets “and that’s” – she rushes, finishing in a descending E-minor–shaped melodic contour, saying “hurting me.” The emotional content gets audibly transferred in a sad-sounding gestalt. In a “creaky voice” with unclear tonal location (Dreyer, 2018), she affirms herself by saying “yes” while Peter remains silent. She continues, accelerating the tempo up to 116 beats per minute and phrasing mechanically, sounding eighth-note triplets on just one tone (b) – her understanding of Peter being close to Sabine is semantically and musically articulated in a rational manner. Again, we hear a rising chromatic line, now at the end of the phrase. This time Peter joins in, continuing Mary’s prosodic line with two rising tones (d# and e) by short hesitations twice. Being onomatopoetically very “close” to Sabine, he is far from taking a stance.

“Stance”, following recent definitions (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018; Goodwin, 2012; Goodwin et al., 2012; Heritage, 2012), can be combined with the theory of Stevanovic and Peräkylä (2014). First of all, “epistemic stance” is at stake, when participants make and negotiate a claim about who knows what. In this perspective, speakers can position themselves as having a greater epistemic authority than their co-interlocutor. Second, “deontic stance” is taken by participants when they label an action as necessary or desirable. This type of stance is mostly expected in contexts of requests and offers, invitations, and advice-giving. Finally, “affective stance” refers to attitudes or feelings publicly displayed. Instances of affective stance can either be laminated onto turns at talk or constitute a turn themselves. As Couper-Kuhlen and Selting state, affect in interaction “is seldom made explicit through words; rather it is indexed through verbal and non-verbal means, meaning that sequence-sensitive interpretation is required” (2018: 44).

Mary meanwhile concludes repetitively in eighth-note triplets “because for such a long time she took care of you when you were a child”, ending her statement again with intervals sounding like E minor. After a short pause, distinctively a tritone higher, Mary, hesitating in “broken” eighth-note triplets and finishing fluently in an F#-minor–like triad, says that he values her very much like a mother. That sounds brighter than before and Peter joins in, this time articulating a recipient token “uhm uhm”. By intonating the pitches d and f# the gestalt of the minor-sounding “mother” gets retrospectively contextualized in a D major sound. By these musical means Peter seems to make an optimistic jump away from Mary’s “sad” prosody in E minor at the beginning.

What we conclude is, first, that we have here an example where not only the affective order can be considered as somehow “disordered” but the epistemic order, too. Second, we find again that Peter seems to be the one who decides deontic imbalances; Mary does not challenge his not taking a stance with respect to the question of relevance for the couple’s definition of their relationship. She lets him talk as animator of Sabine’s quotation; however, his not taking the analytical role as principal makes a further noticeable absence recognizable. So, sometimes, to speak by quotations can mix other voices with one’s own. The extreme possibility is to silence one’s own voice, although one continues speaking (Günthner, 1997). Third, we feel this paradox requires a further frame of reference.

The displacement of origo

Thus, we continue to ask what she might mean by “that” (in line 102). It is a verbal deixis, she points to something – but to what? What is it that hurts her? Is it Sabine’s opinion, quoted by Peter, that she considers Mary to be the wrong woman for Peter? Is it that Peter does not take a stance? Is it that she gets to hear this in front of the camera representing an anonymous audience? Is it that Peter does not defend her? We will try an answer in turning to another author.

Karl Bühler, German psychologist, in his famous “theory of language” (Bühler, 1934/2011) describes the deictic gesture as the beginning of communication and language: Pointing to something and controlling if the other’s gaze follows. The deictic gesture is soon followed by deictic words (“Zeigwörter”), of which here and now are the most important:

(Bühler, 1934/2011, p. 117f)

The deictic field (of I, time, and space) is constituted in a fully subjective orientation which Bühler calls “origo”. The origo-perspective can now be transferred into a field of phantasmatic (or “imaginative”) deixis. Bühler (p. 151) mentions examples, e.g. if you think of a friend it may happen that you hear his voice directly left or right of you. The absent person can be pointed to. And the I can be displaced to another locality, imaginatively. My wife doesn’t find an instrument in the kitchen, she calls me by phone and I displace myself from my reality into the phantasmatic situation to be in our kitchen and guide her gaze where I think she can see the missing instrument.

Such displacement into a phantasma of another person regularly takes place when someone quotes another person directly, using the pronoun I and the recipient immediately understands that another speaker is copied. So, we can understand how we can follow another “origo” into another phantasma, which we enter with flexibility and thus can follow the deictic operations within this phantasmatic world. However, there is a psychological problem Bühler did not address. We enter phantasmatic worlds, but how do we leave them and find our way back to what we think is shared reality? What if someone quotes another person using I and constructs the utterances in a way that it remains unclear where the quotation ended? Or did it end at all? What if there is no exit?

Gallagher (2015) has dedicated a paper to this situation. We all read novels, go to movies, or to the theater, and, when the evening ends, leave the movie or theater, finding ourselves again sharing “our world”. But sometimes one can observe young people who jump out of their seats when Hamlet approaches Polonius behind the curtain and the person cries out a warning. Such a person cannot make a distinction between the world of theater and “our world”. Following Alfred Schütz, Gallagher proposes a “multiple-reality” theory, thinking of children’s pretend play, affordances that motivate various actions and change self-concepts (e.g. when a child sees a banana and plays with it as a telephone). The cognitive requirement is to see something as something and, at the same time know that it is not the thing; the banana remains a banana.

Mary’s and Peter’s world consists of two components: Peter’s loyalty bonds to his “counselors” (like Sabine) and Mary’s attempts to be accepted as a “counselor”, too. In this world Peter would be guided by his counselors; no necessity emerges to create his own voice. Entering this world, Mary positions herself in rivalry to other “counselors” and utters empathic understanding for Peter’s life-long bonds with Sabine. She does not directly challenge that Peter takes a stance. However, this would be an exit-option for Peter to leave the world shared with Sabine and reenter a world shared with Mary. Couple’s therapists call this sharing a phantasmatic world a “collusion” (Dicks 1967; Willi 1984). Thus, the noticeable absence observed here is of relevance for the therapeutic endeavor in couple’s therapy and we propose a linguistic version of what is described as “collusion”. Therapy is an endeavor that tries to build pathways out of a one-world-phantasma in order to find a reentry into a multiple-reality world that can be shared. The therapeutic activity has been described precisely:

(Voutilainen et al., 2010, p. 92)

Now follows a moment where the lemon pie is a lemon pie and is “something else” (Voutilainen et al., 2010) or “something more” (Stern, 2004).

The lemon pie is sour

In the following segment Mary speaks about having earned a living for the couple while Peter was still studying. But some friends, again quoted by Peter, had described her as something like a career-addict. Being assessed from such a critical perspective enrages Mary; she finds it unjust. And a source of her complaint is that she did not know that others have been speaking so negatively about her. She tries to correct this view:

Segment (3)

180 Mary: I (.) I’d like to have a family

181 (1.2)

182 I’d like to relax in someone (0.3)

183 to relax with someone

184 (1.5)

185 and that is what I didn’t have in the last years

186 (0.8)

187 Peter: yes, but you didn’t actively ask for it either and neither

188 Mary: because I wasn’t quite aware of it

189 but only now I do know it

190 but if I (0.4) had had the opportunity °h ((sniffling)) with

191 one of these people that are now saying

192 I want to build a career and the like (0.7)

193 (if they) ever would have brought it up with me (1.3)

194 I would have talked to them and then <<pp> uhm>

195 I’d be definitely eh eh the\ my\ I would have made my point of view better

196 (2.0)

197 or more clearly

198 (0.7)

199 yeah (0.3) could have said

200 (2.7)

201 ((sniffling))

202 (4.7)

203 the lemon pie is so:: sour

204 (0.8)

205 Peter: what do you say

206 Mary: ((laughing))

207 (1.7)

208 Peter: <<laughing>what>

209 it was really sweet it barely tastes like lemon

210 Mary: [(xxx xxx xxx)]

211 Peter: <<laughing> it’s alright to eat it>

212 Mary: << laughing> ah barely>

213 (( sniffling))

214 Peter: ((laughing))

215 (0.8)

216 Peter: yeah

217 (1.2)

218 Peter: but I just find (.) we::ll eh eh eh that \I just still find (some_how) that you shouldn’t (1.0)

219 well y_is\ it is difficult to say

220 I’d like you not to take it so personally /

In line 203 Mary speaks with a low voice: “The lemon pie is so sour” – an utterance out of a pause and followed by extensive laughter on her part. Peter responds contagiously, but it seems that he did not understand what Mary said or, more, that he understood the words but not the meaning of her words or that he doesn’t understand why Mary laughs.

We make a proposal to understand this utterance and the following laughter by taking the sequential position into account. Mary repeatedly has used the word “sour” for the lemon pie’s taste and as colloquial denominator for her own emotional state; to be “sour” means to be in a rage, to be angry. This was what she talked about. Again, she had had to realize that Peter had quoted the utterances of friends (“career-addict”), which increased her being “sour”. In lines 200–202 there is a pause of almost 8 seconds, interrupted by her sniffing. Out of this silence comes her sentence, which is not only a repetition, but is slightly changed: “so:: sour”. We assume that in this pause something important happened of which this sentence is the result, with a leap into relieved laughter. Here is how Mary and Peter interact at line 200 (see Figure 17.7).

Figure 17.7 The pause before Mary’s saying “the lemon pie is so:: sour”.

She fights back her tears, he leans his head back and tackles his fingers. He looks at her, she directs her gaze inwardly (see Figure 17.8).

Figure 17.8 Mary fighting with her tears, Peter tackling with fingers.

With protruded lips she utters “The lemon pie is so:: sour”. And then it looks like as if she is surprised by her own words, she seems to try to take back what she has said, but she explodes into laughter (see Figure 17.9).

Figure 17.9 Mary: “The lemon pie is so:: sour”– her face lightened and fresh.

And laughter begins on her face, followed by her covering her face with her hands, feet pointing upwards (see Figure 17.10).

Figure 17.10 Mary surprised by her own discovering how sour the lemon pie is, face in hands, feet in tension upwards, Peter having stopped tackling his fingers, looking down bored.

This analysis focuses on the utterance from line 200 onward. One irregular thing is that Peter does not understand; in lines 205–208 he twice asks “What?”. The basic CA rule that the meaning of an utterance is generated in the ear of the hearer does not apply here – unless we assume that she responds (with laughter) to her own utterance. She listens to her own words that seem to come “out of the blue” and they represent a “something else”. A new definition of the common “token-as-type” format seems to emerge; not only is the lemon pie sour. It is she herself who is sour and the tacit equation that she meant by “lemon pie” is like a new discovery for her. She is a lemon pie and, of course, she is not a lemon pie. She seems to ponder the idea that to talk about lemon pie was a metaphor for her. What happens here is a “now moment” as described in the clinical literature (Stern 2004).

Our conclusion is, first, to expand the basic CA rule so that speakers can be considered self-listeners and that sometimes they respond to their own utterances. This is, for example, the case in the many studies on self-repair (Corrin 2010; Forrester 2008; Kitzinger 2013). Mary responds to her utterance with a delay, she seems to need time to understand, herself, what she has uttered here. Something seems to happen that could not have been predicted from the previous turns. Then, Mary points out something implicit, her formulation not only says “I am sour” or “lemon pies are sour”, both of which would be trivial; she combines both formulations in a way that “something else” is created. Applying the linguistic analysis of metaphor (Lakoff 1987) we can write in a formal way:

a) Lemon pie = (attribute) “sour”
b) Mary = (attribute) “sour” (summarizing many of her utterances in such a formula)
From what follows the abductive conclusion
c) (talk about) Lemon pie = (talk about) Mary

Which means, the flash of that moment throws a new light on the couple’s common talk, retrospectively. Talking about lemon pie acquires a new meaning, it appears as talk about being “sour” oneself, she and Peter. Talking about lemon pie silences a relevant emotional meaning of the couple’s talk. The cognitive dimension of this affordance cannot be overlooked. It requires a style of cognitive fluidity, it frees her from the anger she has uttered. She explodes in laughter about her self-surprising formulation; Peter cannot follow the curvilinearity of this change. A surplus of meaning emerges which can be read as “I am the lemon pie (we have been talking about)”.

Daniel Stern: “now moments”

Mary laughs because she listens to how she produced a “now moment” (Stern 2004). Her formulation could open a playground in the same way as a child discovers a banana as a telephone and another person steps in by taking a second banana and so a funny telephone play could start. However, now moments require a special kind of answer that changes them to “moments of meetings” – a meeting not within the limits of rules and institutionalized forms, but existential encounter. Stern describes how “now moments” have a time of 8 to 10 seconds to wait for a response. Here it is Peter who does not grasp the chance to evolve the now moment into a moment-of-meeting.

It is a pity that Daniel Stern’s theory has been developed without an exchange with CA traditions. But these traditions can easily be recalled. In a shortened version one could say that people’s conversation under normal circumstances is guided by standard rules of conduct. This is even the case in psychotherapy. However, sometimes it happens that this role-guided conversation ends and a new, more existential, deeper level of conversation is opened (the now moment) and during 8 to 10 seconds one can wait to see if a response is found, that the other conversationalist has understood that “something more” (Stern 2004) happens (Voutilainen et al. spoke of “something else”). Viewed in a social science framework this is not as surprising as one might think:

(Goffman, 1967, p. 113)

Goffman views role-bound interaction as unavoidable in order to protect each other’s face, mutually. As well as unio mystico having a slight spiritual overtone, he considers the individual self as “ceremonial”, even as “sacred”:

It is therefore important to see that the self is in part a ceremonial thing, a sacred object which must be treated with proper ritual care and in turn must be presented in a proper light to others. As a means through which this self is established, the individual acts with proper demeanor while in contact with others and is treated by others with deference. It is just as important to see that if the individual is to play this kind of sacred game, then the field must be suited to it. The environment must assure that the individual will not pay too high a price with good demeanor and the deference will be accorded to him. Deference and demeanor practices must be institutionalized so that the individual will be able to project a viable, sacred self and stay in the game on a proper ritual basis.

(Goffman, 1967, p. 91)

Ritual and ritual care, “game”, field, institutionalized practice (and we could add “rules” and “norms”) – Goffman uses all these terms in order to analyze how individuals mutually protect each other from malicious behavior. He knows that conversation and interaction always run this risk of derailment. However, he sees more than such destructive ends if rule-governed behavior were to be given up. In rare “moments and their men” (p. 3) a kind of higher deference might be enacted. We add, that these moments might include a realization that we live not only in one world, but in many. This is a step out of a couple’s collusion (in clinical terms), out of only one “phantasma” (in Bühler’s terms) into a multifaceted world with various (epistemic, affective, deontic) “orders” (in terms of intersubjectivity theory) and all this is done by talk-in-interaction of which we have described the power of silencing-while-speaking.

Conclusion – toward a typology of interactive silencing

As to the topic of silence and silencing, we found the analysis of this couple’s conversation extremely fruitful. Social theorists and conversation analysts take intense interest in processes of silence and silencing. Keywords for their theoretical interests in silencing are communicative absence, noticeable absence, the developing of analytical role conceptions, and we could show the usefulness of linguistic metaphor analysis demonstrating that something like a “lemon pie” is an object of reality and then can jump into another cognitive context. We want to inspire a further study of such “hybrid objects” (Gallagher 2015).

We saw how Mary accuses Peter with list-colligations, how he defends himself by disassembly, and how Peter managed not to take a stance, and how, for one moment, Mary could allow herself to formulate an utterance which could have had the potential to change things deeply; unfortunately, Peter could not respond. Although this couple speaks a lot, one gets a detailed impression of what it is that is unsaid. Relevant theories were brought in, in order to make some things visible.

One gets an idea why talking with couples in a therapeutic context is so often difficult. We were informed that this couple finished a two-year therapy, and today, a katamnestic interview revealed, they live happily together, with children.

Why, we want to ask at the end, is it so difficult for a couple to break through the walls of silence? Are there general reasons that might make it difficult to perform or demand a personal stance? We think, there are some general reasons why this is a risky endeavor. To conclude, we will try to address these reasons or motivations as different types of silence and/or silencing.

We described how Goffman had a fine sensitivity for the “sacred game” of interaction and conversation. Skillfully, many people manage to correct errors and this is, often enough, an interactional resource. Not to address difficult things in an interaction often enough keeps things going. We call this first type “Silence or Silencing as not addressing the obvious”.

We could learn (Jefferson 1974) that people often do this in such a way that they do not seem to realize at all how they denied that a noteworthy difficulty appeared. However, such denial is, then, soon established as a next rule for the continuing conversation and once you have committed yourself to this rule of denial you begin to feel how difficult it would be to break it. One reason can be assumed in circumstances thus produced. If you deny the denial you risk being accused of having committed yourself to the rule. Thus, to overcome this second type, “Silence as denial of denial”, is a complex conversational operation; whoever tries to overcome this in a long-established relationship runs the risk of being treated as a traitor or a scapegoat. To understand this conversational process more deeply will be a task for applied conversation analysis in psychotherapy.

We made use of the concept of “stance” as developed in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. Drawing on the systematics outlined in Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2018: chap. C, 1–68), we interpreted moments of silence and/or silencing as public displays of epistemic, deontic, or affective stance.

We continue our simple systematics of silencing by including, but going beyond, noticeable absences as advocated from the early days of CA onwards by Sacks and colleagues by the following types.

In moments of epistemic stance, we found that after a long pause, Mary displays a broader or, if you will, deeper understanding of the couple’s complex situation by uttering “the lemon pie is so:: sour”. Peter displays no understanding here and does not make any attempt to question or sustain her epistemic stance. Third, we call this “Silence as passing over an initiative (without further comment”).

Fourth, he positions himself as someone who can give his wife good advice, telling her what she has to do in order to cope with her difficult relationship to the people surrounding the couple who do not appreciate her pursuing a serious carreer: “I’d like you not to take it so personally /” (line 220). We call this type “Silencing as repression of a disturbance or worry”. We could argue that this deontic stance is, in a way, silencing his wife’s attempt to achieve a better understanding via self-irony and thus to see their collusional curse from a bird’s-eye perspective.

Fifth, in displays of affective stance we saw that a silence can reign as a sign of something missing. After having reported that his “second mother Sabine” actually said that he would be better off with “another type of woman” instead of Mary, Mary waits for him to take an affective stance, which he does not. We call this “Silencing as non-delivery”. As Couper-Kuhlen and Selting have it:

(2018, p. 1; cf. also Du Bois 2007)

But, sixth, Peter does not take this affective stance. This noticeable absence is followed by a stance by Mary, affective in nature, claiming to be hurt. This is yet again another type of silencing, because Mary only does her husband’s job, so to speak. Instead, she could have requested the delivery of the missing stance, by insisting that Peter utter it. Thus, Mary practices what we call a “Silence as non-challenging.”

In a nutshell then, the communicative task the participants in our single case study attributed to themselves and quite thoroughly pursuit could be phrased as

either keeping silence, i.e. not wording what the other expects in sequentially defined moments of talk-in-interaction (cf. the noticeable absences due to the expectation of (dis)alignment with stance above)
or to take a stance without being invited to do so in order to silence certain affects as in the case of the deontic stance “you should not take things too personally”.

This simplest of systematics, so we hope, could inspire further investigation for a classification of silencing in conversation.

Appendix – German transcript versions

Segment (1)

32 Mary: ich wIll dich nicht kontrolLIEren.

33 w:as ich\ was ich IMmer, (2.1)

34 was ich immer MEIne is ähm:- (0.7)

35 einfach dass du mich auch mal so als beRAterin siehst.

36 und das gefÜhl HAB ich nIcht;

37 (1.0)

38 ich hab das geFÜHL dass: ähm-

39 dass du meh:r (0.7) auf ähm: (.) auf den rat anderer MENschen hörst?

40 wenn du (den\ letztendlich) ne entSCHEIdung triffst-

41 was zu machen oder NICH zu machen? (0.5)

42 mEhr auf die entscheidung dieser anderen perSOnen hörst-

43 als dass was ich dir (0.6) gerRAten hab;

44 <<all> weil letzendlich is genau dasSELbe was ich dir gesAgt hab> nur- °hh

45 im dritt\ n_n: wenn du mir was MITteilst sagst-

46 jA aber FElix hat gemeint dass; (0.4)

47 nEin aber mein PApa hat gesagt dass;

48 nee MAma hat gemeint;=

49 Peter: =<<:->(auf) mein PApa hör_ch nich;>=

50 Mary: =na gut deine MUTter;

51 Peter: <<schnaufend>h° <lachend>hehe>> (0.7) °hh äh::;

52 (2.6)

Segment (2)

90 Mary: und AUßerdem weil es saBIne war.

91 (3.6)

92 weil saBIne ja gesagt hat dass wir uns lieber TRENnen sollten.

93 (0.5)

94 Peter: nEin das hat sabIne NICH gesagt.

95 saBIne hatte gesagt dass ich äh: (1.2)

96 DASS: dass (1.0) es::: äh:::(2.6)

97 ja doch vielleicht hat sie_s <<behaucht>DOCH gesagt->

98 Mary: hast du mir doch geS[AGT,]

99 Peter: [äh ] sie hat nIch gesagt

dass wir uns TRENnen sollen.=

100 =(dass) vielleicht für mich ne andere Art FRAU besser wäre;

101 (3.4)

102 Mary: n_das_is: verLETzend für mich.

103 (0.6)

104 <<creaky, p> ja> so sehr die sabIne dir NAheliegt,

105 [weil sie ] ja solange

106 Peter: [((räuspern))]

107 Mary: [auf dich ] Aufgepasst hat als du KIND warst.

108 Peter: [((räuspern))]

109 (0.9)

110 Mary: und und du sie schOn: sehr wie eine MUTter (wert)schätzt;

111 Peter: hm_hm,

Segment (3)

180 Mary ich (.) ich hÄtte gern faMIlie.

181 (1.2)

182 ich wÜrde mich gerne auch AUSruhen in jEmandem; (0.3)

183 bei jemandem AUSruhen;

184 (1.5)

185 und das is das: was ich in den letzten jAhren nich HATte;

186 (0.8)

187 Peter: ja aber du hast es auch nich EINgefordert oder auch nich-

188 Mary: wEil es mir nich ganz beWUSST war.

189 aber jetzt WEISS ich es auch.

190 aber hätte ich (0.4) die möglichkeit geHABT mit °h ((schnieft)) mit- (0.5)

191 EIner von diesen leuten die jetzt sAgen;

192 ich will karRIEre oder sowas. (0.7)

193 JEmals drauf Angesprochen HÄTten; (1.3)

194 hätte ich mit denen geREdet und dann <<pp>ähm>-

195 wäre ich sicherlich auch äh_äh den\ mein\ hätte ich denen meinen STANDpunkt besser (xxx xxx) machen können.

196 (2.0)

197 oder KLArer.

198 (0.7)

199 <<p>ja (0.3) SAgen können;>

200 (2.7)

201 ((schnieft))

202 (4.7)

203 <<p> der zitrOnenkuchen is so: SAUer;

204 (0.8)

205 Peter: <<all> WAS sagst du;>

206 Mary: ((lacht))

207 (1.7)

208 Peter: <<lachend> WAS,>

209 [der war ganz ] sÜß der schmeckt ganz wenig nur nach ziTROne.

210 Mary: [(xxx xxx xxx)] lachend

211 Peter: [<<lachend>(ka_ma schon ESsen;)>]

212 Mary: [<<>(ah ganz WEnig;)> ]

213 ((schnieft))

214 Peter: ((lacht))

215 (0.8)

216 Peter °h ja

217 (1.2)

218 Peter aber ich find halt (.) also äh_äh_äh: dass-\ ich find halt

trOtzdem (irg_wie) dass du das NICH so- (1.0)

219 <<p> na j_is\ es_is so schwer zu SAgen;>

220 ich hätte gerne dass du_s wEniger perSÖNlich nimmst.

Notes

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Chapter 17

Speaking that silences