POLITE SILENCE AND SILENT POLITENESS

Silence is multifaceted and complex linguistic phenomenon. This article explores two phenomena of silence, they are: polite silence and silent politeness. Polite silence is the speaker’s silence as an intention to be polite, while silent politeness is the hearer’s interpretation of silence as politeness strategy. In western societies, silence has been the focus of the studies in the last two decade. However, it has not been studied to such an extent in Indonesian language. The purpose of the current study is to describe: 1)how silence is practiced as a politeness strategy in terms of the speacer’s intention. 2) what type of silence is evaluated as polite by the hearer’s interpretation. One of the significant finding emerged from this study is that silence as a politeness strategy is intended by the speaker in paraller way as evaluated by hearer. Non-linguistic devices referred to as the clue for the speaker and hearer is evaluated eye contact, facial expression, and body gesture.