Claire Jones

SILENCE IN COURT: The Operative Value of Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle in Silences During Cross-Examination

My research explores the pragmatic implications of silent responses during questioning in the cross-examination of a murder trial. Focusing specifically on Paul Grice’s theory of implicature, the study investigates whether the Cooperative Principle operates in the same way during adversarial interaction as it does in casual conversation. The Gricean framework assists in understanding how inferences are drawn from non-literal language, but it does not take into consideration silence as a means of communication. Analysis of selected exchanges taken from the trail have revealed that there are instances when strategical silence impacts following turns of interaction resulting in a different type of implicature not considered in the original theory.