The Communicative Strategy of Silence in Autobiographical Discourse

The aim of the article is to study factors of representation and implementation of the communicative strategy of silence in autobiographical discourse. The material of the research is 100 clerical autobiographies written by residents of Tomsk in the 1920s-1990s on special forms or on sheets of paper, and 140 oral autobiographical stories of Siberian old-timers which were recorded in Tomsk region from 1940 to 2018. Silence is considered as a communicative strategy aimed at providing incomplete information about authors of autobiographies, including its deliberate concealment. It seems that it is one of the main communicative strategies along with self-presentation that people use during telling about themselves. Silence in autobiographical texts can be connected with different factors, the main of which is its genre specificity: authors/informants cannot tell everything about their lives, describe their every day from the moment of birth, they select the most important events from their lives to include them in the text. It is revealed that silence is also connected with the communicative situation, including interlocutors, the subject of communication, time constraints. On the one hand, informants/authors of oral and written texts have the same goal: to tell about themselves. On the other hand, the generation of autobiographical oral and written texts is different: in one case, the informant tells the researcher about oneself, answers questions, clarifies something, explains, etc.; and in the other case the author of the future written text of an autobiography can only imagine the recipient, and sometimes uses a form of autobiography with specified requirements (questions) that need to be answered in the text. Silence is also connected with psychological factors: the informant's unwillingness to report something, embarrassment, etc. The topic of the narrative can cause different feelings, experiences of informants. So silence can be connected with psychological reasons: shame, embarrassment, traumatic experience of the informant or author of the written text. Silence is also connected with social and political reasons, the historical, political context (fear of being arrested, exiled), the repressive policy of the state, the time of writing of an autobiography. The memory of the Soviet era, the fear of persecution and arrest is still preserved, so informants can ask where the autobiographical stories recorded by researchers will be used. In autobiographies, people mostly talk only about their positive features, without pointing out the negative sides, try to create a positive impression about themselves. In this sense, the communicative strategy of silence is related to the communicative strategy of self-presentation.

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