The Pragmatics of Silence in Pasquale Verdicchio’s Only You

In this essay I offer a reading of the collection of poetry Only You by Pasquale Verdicchio, in the light of the theories of Pragmatics applied to silence. In the first section, I examine the main contributions to the debate on silence and Pragmatics, from Steiner (1967) to Khatchadourian (2015), passing through Austin, Grice, Searle and Sperber & Wilson. Particular relevance is also given to Jaworski’s (1993), Kurzon’s (1998) and Ephratt’s, the latter being the author of many recent studies on “eloquent silence” and its pragmatic functions (2008; 2011; 2022). Some biographical information and an overview of Verdicchio’s poetic production is then offered in the second section. In the third section, I analyze a choice of the poems from the above-mentioned collection, in the wake of Khatchadourian’s theory of the standard stages in illocutionary speech acts, McLuhan’s concept of “hot” as opposed to “cool” medium of communication and Jaworski’s idea of silence as it is enacted in visual arts. Silence invariably seeps through the loose limits set by Verdicchio’s poetic language, often evoked by the rhetoric device of negation or suggested by the extended metaphor of absence and its correlatives.