This volume comprises a wide range of innovative studies that address the issue of silence and absence in written and verbal discourses, proposing routes for the empirical analysis of such phenomena.
The first part of the book contains studies that make use of comparison as a tool to identify absence in discourse. Ch. 2 (Manuel Alcántara-Plá & Ana Ruiz-Sánchez) and ch. 5 (Cecilia Strand) analyse tweets in comparison to other types of media to identify absences in those discourses. The former uncovers the absence of migration from the digital platform, while the latter observes the absence of sexual minority discourses in Ugandan print media. Ch. 4 (Alan Partington) and ch. 7 (Jiayi Wang & Dániel Z. Kádár) rely on corpus-assisted discourse analysis as their main methodology. Partington identifies the absence of the early Arab Spring uprisings in British newspaper discourse. Similarly, Wang & Kádár look at the absence of Chinese smog in mainstream media when the Chinese government is not addressing this issue as part of their political agenda. In ch. 3, Sameera Durrani compares visual representations of Iran and Pakistan in Time magazine. By doing so, the author identifies absences in each of them. Finally, ch. 6 (Kieran O'Halloran) compares a newspaper opinion piece to a parliamentary debate in order to show what aspects make the argument built on the latter a straw man argument.
The studies in the second part of the book investigate how the interplay of a variety of means can produce discursive absence. Ch. 8 (Patricia von Münchow) brings some analytical procedures, designed to reveal meaningful absences and silence (e.g. looking for ‘instabilities’ within a data set and comparing different data sets), and explores the absence of fathers as active caretakers of their children in parenting related materials. Ch. 9 (Nina Venkataraman) and ch. 10 (Taiwo Oluwaseun Ehineni) illustrate how certain grammatical patterns, such as presuppositions and omissions, contribute to the effect of silencing in media. Venkataraman demonstrates how climate change and environmental refugees are silenced in two major British newspapers. Ehineni analyses Nigerian news media and shows how those patterns highlight the small number of girls who were rescued from a massive abduction while backgrounding the large numbers of girls who were still imprisoned.
The last part of the book has studies that look at surface indicators of silence and absence. In ch. 11, Crispin Thurlow & Jamie Moshin present several tactics used for omitting or replacing taboo language in newspaper discourse, showing how those tactics end up working to emphasize these absences. Ch. 12, by Joanna Garbutt, uses tools from Conversation Analysis to demonstrate how suspects in police interviews obtain some control over the interaction when using the phrase ‘no comment’, and how officers respond to this phrase by pursuing the same line of inquiry or by changing the topic. The final chapter, by Dorte Madsen, explores the challenges of theorizing absence through the identification of the empty signifier by looking at the term interdisciplinarity.
The studies presented in this book provide meaningful results and show relevant empirical routes into the study of absence and silence in discourse, thus filling in an important gap in literature.
