Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse

“Melani Schröter has provided us with a much needed and incisive investigation of discursive absences and the metadiscourse about such absences. The silence of politicians is something that should concern us as much as, if not more than, their noisy media messages. This is a timely book.”

“Based on detailed analyses of three cases of high-profile “silences” in German political discourse over the past decades, Schröter’s book provides innovative insights into the strategic function of communicative concealment and its treatment in the media and parliamentary enquiry as well as its effects on democracy. It thus makes an important contribution to the communicative ethics of political discourse.”

“In this book, Melani Schröter examines silence, or more specifically the metadiscourse of silence. Basing her approach on Bühler’s Organon model of communication, and on critical discourse analysis, the author investigates how the silence of leading German politicians was discussed in the media. She analyzes first the attitude of a Bundestag committee to the silence of Helmut Kohl in the CDU party donation scandal of 1999-2001, then the silence of the Barschel scandal of 1987-88, in which three leading members of the opposition in Schleswig-Holstein – who were the victims of the scandal – knew about the intrigues going on against them, but kept silent, and finally, bringing the silence of politicians up-to-date, she analyzes the silence of the present German chancellor Angela Merkel – her so-called "collected silences".
Schröter gives a thorough account of the events that provide the context for the silences, and presents an exhaustive discussion of the metadiscourse of silence. Politicians are expected to speak, to communicate with the electorate. Their silence in this context does not mean “not speaking” but “failure to talk about a given matter”, i.e. 'silence about'. She proposes a Gricean-inspired cooperative principle: ‘do not be silent when speech is expected’ and ‘do not talk when silence is expected’, whose violation leads to implicatures – interpretations of the silence derived from the context and from the assumption that the politician may have something to conceal.”

“Melani Schröter’s book Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse constitutes an insightful contribution to the fields of communication studies, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and in particular, it provides a better understanding of communicative and meaningful silences in political discourse.”

“In addition to the great theoretical insights it offers, readers can also expect to explore practical values in the attested research methods adopted in empirical studies. More significantly, it opens up possible avenues of research that encourage innovative application of combined and cross-disciplinary approaches in discourse studies.”