Abstract
<jats:p>Definitions of silence in pragmatics and semiotics face a dilemma. Criteria built on the speaker's choice or on the hearer's perception either exclude clear cases or admit everything that lacks linguistic material, down to the zero morpheme, which the field has kept out by stipulation and not by criterion. This paper proposes the discursive bay: a stretch of interaction in which no linguistic material is manifest and whose indexical load is carried by the marks that open and close it. The unit of analysis moves from the interval to the pair of marks that demarcate it, so that membership is decided by demarcation rather than by absence, and the zero morpheme falls outside without a special ruling. The criterion is not new. Poyatos stated it in 1984 for silence and stillness together and Saville-Troike stated it for verbal silence, and the field cited both without adopting either. Four published descriptions are re-read to show that the criterion reaches material collected under every one of the live definitions.</jats:p>