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Working on relationships in oral exchange permits the retreat into silence to be more efective and meaningful. "In 1969 across the world, changes began to take place in Trappist monasteries. The severe discipline of the past, including near total silence, was modified. Replacing the mandatory silence was a new rule: "Brief, oral communication without asking permission is given everyone." Thus the monks passed from an era of enforced solitude and silence to one of limited interpersonal communication with their brothers. In 1970 we began to study this unique phenomenon through interviews, observations, and questionnaires conducted in seven abbeys. From our observations and the monks' responses can be gained much concerning the value of silence and its relation to communication.Silence has been discussed, analyzed, and in some cases, advocated by a wide spectrum of people from many areas of thought. Writers like Thoreau (14) and Steiner (13) and religious thinkers such as Picard (12) and Merton (9) along with many scholars (3, 4, 5 ) have talked about silence. Even psychologists (1) and marriage counselors (11) have written of its value. Yet both silence, the absence of speech, and solitude, the absence of human contact, remain frightening to many people.Silence is dynamically related to interpersonal communication. Interactive speech fills the need for acceptance and permits reflective definition of the self.These conditions occur when the individual human being acts as an information processor, accepting input from external sources and emitting speech behaviors toward those others. Silence allows the individual to engage in internal integration and self definition. The individual seeks identity, a wholeness which occurs from self talk.

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The structural linguistic metaphor is attractive and potentially powerful. Scholars in a variety of fields have suggested a grammar or syntax of conversation. Goffman (1967), a sociologist, proposed a syntactical view of social interaction. Jaffe (1967), in studying the rhythms of dialogue from the perspective of clinical psychology, set forth the goal of developing a grammar of conversation. Research workers in psychiatry have presented the notion of the punctuation of interaction sequences (Watzlawick et ai 1967), a distinctly grammatical metaphor. Stech (1970b), speaking from the perspective of a communication scholar, attempted to set up a generative grammar of interaction. A team of ethnomethodologists in sociology presented a systematic grammar of turn-taking in conversation (Sacks et al. 1974). The syntactical metaphor has been used suggestively and in very preliminary ways, but without much sophistication, in the assessment of conversation.Such a view of human interaction is essentially structuralist in its foundations. Structural linguistics, initiated in the work of de Saussure (1916) and made elegant by a host of recent workers, provides the base from which to work. As a method, structuralism consists of two forms of analysis, that of the kinds of acts, paradigmatic analysis, and that of the recursive rules by which acts are formed into strings, syntagmatic analysis. The well-known work of Levi-Strauss (1963) in anthropology is the most extended application of the method outside of linguistics. Structural analysis has been applied to poetry (Hough 1969, for example) and long narrative works (Barthes 1966) in the field of literary criticism. An entire philosophic movement, structuralism, has evolved in France (Ehrmann 1970) based upon the techniques and insights of the structural linguists.The concept of structure seems to imply at least three different characteristics: nonrandomness, wholeness, and well formedness. Structure has been used as a synonym for nonrandomness in the application of information theory to psychology (Garner 1962). Shannon's work (Shannon and Weaver 1949) on the analysis of the Semiotica 39-1/2 (1982), 75-91.