Özet:

The purpose of the article is to study silence and its linguistic means of expression in relation to the macro- and micro-structures of literary text. The theoretical foundation of this research involves linguistic and literary studies that consider the communicative, pragmatic, semantic, cultural, and literary-historical aspects of silence and emphasize its difference from quietness, which should be understood as a natural phenomenon. Based on the model of literary communication, we have identified the role of silence in the author-text-reader triad as well as the ways it is realized in the structure and language of literary text. This paper finds within its scope that silence not only occurs as non-speaking, but also as non-meaningful speech that actualizes the semantics of silence in the context of a communicative situation. These two opposite forms of silence come to the forefront in Robert Walser’s (1878-1956) Berlin novels and are subject to a close analysis from the perspectives of macro- and micro-stylistics. The study analyzes the narrative principle of chatting in Walser’s The Tanners (1907), text irony in his The Assistant (1908), and the fragmentary narrative style in his Jakob von Gunten (1909) and establishes that silence is realized both at the thematic level as well as in the structure and language of the text. As a narrative strategy, silence influences the form and content of Walser’s Berlin novels and thus achieves the author’s desired effect on the reader.

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