■ Nathan Badenoch Villanova University baideanach@gmail.com Silence, Cessation and Stasis: The Ethnopoetics of “Absence” in Bit Expressives The study of expressive language has helped illustrate how ideophonicity operates between grammar and performance, as both syntax and poetics, across a wide range of phenomena experienced by speakers. In the Bit language, spoken in Laos and China by approximately 2,400 people, there is a rich vocabulary of expressives, or ideophones, used to depict a lack of movement, action or agency. In doing so, Bit speakers define silence in terms of sound, stillness in terms of potential or past movement, and absence through the experience of expectation or habit. It is widely recognized that silence is not simply the lack of sound, but this analysis shows how culturally specific conceptions of the meaning of silence can be represented with the marked poetic language of expressives to account for the experience of various forms of absence. As such the analysis is an exploration of how ethnopoetics and semiotic ideology intersect in the production of Bit linguistic culture. [ethnopoetics, expressives, ideophones, semiotic ideology, silence] W hat does silence sound like? How is a lack of sound included in acts of speech? Speakers of Bit, an Austroasiatic language spoken in the Laos- China-Vietnam border area, have words to depict silence – as both a perceptual and emotive experience – in a wide range of situations. Silence is part of a larger semantic domain of “absence”, which is commonly given voice through the use of expressives in Bit. Expressives, a special class of marked words also known as ideophones or mimetics, are used to depict vivid sensory perception (Dingemanse 2012). Expressives are used frequently, enthusiastically and creatively in Bit linguistic culture, and are emblematic of a linguistic ideology that values aesthetic affect in speech. The following situation exemplifies this usage, abstracted from a conversa- tion in a field hut during a break in rice planting in 2016 with a 36 year-old man who has been a rich source of expressive meaning and usage for me. A tropical squall moved through the narrow valley. The farmers huddled in the field hut were chatting and joking, waiting for the rain to pass. The rain suddenly stopped, brɨɨt. The farmers halted their conversation and headed back out to their work in the fields. For a speaker of Bit, the expressive brɨɨt conveys the silence that is “heard,” or felt, after a sound has stopped, as well as the stillness of the ambient environmental conditions and the speaker’s feelings about experiencing that situation. Silence and other types of absence can be “experienced as embodied substance or activity” (Fronzy 2017) and depicted through the use of phonological iconicity, morphological Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 32, Issue 1, pp. 94–115, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2021 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12314. 94