Echoes of the Unspoken: Comparative Poetics of Silence and Speech Breakdown in Ca Dao and Anglo-Scottish Ballads

Abstract

This study investigates the cross-cultural poetics of silence and speech breakdown in Vietnamese ca dao and Anglo–Scottish ballads through an integrated Form–Cognition–Affect–Culture framework. Combining corpus-based and performance analysis, it explores how silence operates simultaneously as a structural device and a culturally embedded act of meaning-making. A comparative corpus of 100 texts (50 per tradition) reveals three dominant mechanisms—ellipsis, truncation, and enjambment—whose distribution reflects contrasting semiotic ideologies. In ca dao, silence cultivates communal empathy and indirect moral guidance, aligning with Confucian–Buddhist communicative ethics. In the ballads, by contrast, it generates moral ambiguity and emotional rupture, transforming omission into narrative tension. Quantitative and qualitative findings demonstrate that silence constitutes a generative semiotic field mediating cognition, emotion, and contextual value. The study refines existing theories of performance and aesthetic response (Bauman, 1986; Fischer-Lichte, 2008; Iser, 1978) and introduces a transferable comparative model for analyzing the unspoken across oral traditions. Its implications extend to folklore pedagogy, translation studies, and cultural heritage preservation, highlighting silence as an active agent in intercultural poetics and collective memory.