Аннотация:The paper gives a brief account of the role of pause in verbal interaction and presents new corpus data on communication strategies of 40 American English speakers engaged in ten everyday polylogues. We distinguish pause as a natural phenomenon in speech production which provides for breathing and cognitive planning from pause as a tool in acting and other forms of public speaking utilized as a rhetorical device. We hold that silence may speak, and the role of pause in verbal interaction is underestimated, as our research testified. Personality traits expressed by means of silent and filled pauses may receive an entirely new interpretation when viewed as a way of manipulating audiences, making an impact, regulating other participants’ speaking time, i.e. considered in the situation of talk-in-interaction. In polylogues we found that by discriminating the length of between-turns-pauses from pauses within turns one speaker managed to achieve dominance, while others, who failed to do it, consciously or unconsciously, turned out to be passive participants in the interaction. We also specified gender roles in coordinating participants’ speaking time by overlaps and interruptions.