Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness

Abstract

This article delineates five forms of textual elision or `silence': speech—act silences, presuppositional silences, discreet silences, genre-based silences and manipulative silences. Manipulative silence receives extended attention, as it is felt to be the most ideologically powerful form of silence in public discourse. A case study on the discourse of homelessness, drawing on a corpus of 163 newspaper articles and editorials published in the US during early 1999, is used to illustrate how manipulative silences work and, more importantly, how they can be systematically identified by the discourse analyst. The article concludes with a discussion of the notion of authorial `intentionality'.

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