The name says it all. I dare say that this is my favourite novel written by David Lodge. It is about a retired professor of Linguistics (namely pragmatics) and a student ( she's a psychopath) who wants him to supervise her PhD thesis (in which she wants to analyze suicidal notes). The book is extremely interesting and easy to read.
In what follows I will write some memorable quotations from the text where Lodge describes the field of linguistics and then when he describes the theory of speech acts as proposed by Austin and later by Searle.
1. "He found linguistics a fascinating subject – how could one ever lose interest in it? As he used to tell the first-year students in his introductory lecture of welcome, ‘Language is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from animals on the one hand and machines on the other, what makes us self-conscious beings, capable of art, science, the whole of civilization. It is the key to understanding everything.’ His own field was, broadly speaking, discourse: language above the level of the sentence, language in use, langue approached via parole rather than the other way round. It was probably the most fertile and productive area of the discipline I recent times: historical philology was out of fashion and structural and transformational linguistics had lost their allure since people had come to realize the futility of trying to reduce the living and always changing phenomenon of language to a set of rules illustrated by contextless model sentences often invented for the purpose. ‘Every utterance or written sentence always has a context, is always in some sense referring to something already said and inviting a response, is always designed to do something to somebody, a reader or a listener. Studying this phenomenon is sometimes called pragmatics, sometimes stylistics. Computers enable us to do it with unprecedented rigour, analyzing digitized databases of actual speech and writing – generating a whole new sub-discipline, corpus linguistics. A comprehensive term for all this work is discourse analysis. We live in discourse as fish live in water. Systems of law consist of discourse. Diplomacy consists of discourse. The beliefs of the great world religions consist of discourse. And in a world of increasing literacy and multiplying media of verbal communication – radio, television, the Internet, advertising, packaging, as well as books, magazines and newspapers – discourse has come more and more to dominate even the non-verbal aspects of our lives. We eat discourse (mouthwatering menu language, for instance, like ‘flame-roasted peppers drizzled with truffle oil’) we drink discourse (‘hints of tobacco, vanilla, chocolate and ripe berries in this feisty Australian Shiraz’); we look at discourse (those minimalist paintings and cryptic installations in galleries that depend entirely on curators’ and critics’ descriptions of them for their existence as art); we even have sex by enacting the discourses of erotic fiction and sex manuals. To understand culture and society you have to be able to analyse their discourses."
2. "What kind of a speech act is a suicide note? It depends of course on what classification system you’re using. In the classic Austin scheme there are three possible types of speech act entailed in any utterance, spoken or written: the locutionary (which is to say what you say, the propositional meaning), the illocutionary (which is the effect the utterance is intended to have on others) and the perlocutionary (which is the effect it actually has). But there are lots of further distinctions and subcategories and alternative typologies like Searle’s commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative, indirect speech acts and so on. Most utterances have both locutionary meaning and illocutionary force. The hazy area is the line between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Is the perlocutionary properly speaking a linguistic act at all? Austin gives an example of a man who says ‘Shoot her!’ (a rather odd example to invent, when you think about it, a symptom of male chauvinism and misogyny among Oxford dons perhaps). Locution: He said to me ‘Shoot her’ meaning by ‘shoot’ shoot and by her ‘her’. Illocution: he urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her. Perlocution: he persuaded me to shoot her. The interesting level is the illocutionary: even in this example you can see how the same words can have quite different illocutionary force in different contexts. A little exercise I used to give first-year students was to imagine such contexts. ‘He ordered me to shoot her’, for example, might describe an SS officer’s command to a guard in a concentration camp. ‘He advised me to shoot her’ needs a little more imagination, there’s such a moral gap between the cool finite verb and the brutal infinitive; some Mafia godfather perhaps, speaking to a member of his family whose wife has been unfaithful to him. (On further reflection, only beta minus for that one: normally both the weapon and the target must be present for ‘shoot’ to be felicitous.)
What about a suicide note that consisted entirely of the words ‘I intend to shoot myself’? Locution: he stated his intention to shoot himself, meaning by ‘intend’ intend, by ‘shoot’ shoot and by ‘myself’ himself. Illocution: here are several possibilities here. He could be explaining, to those who would find him dead, that he shot himself deliberately, not accidentally, or that he was not shot by another person. He could be expressing the despair which had driven him to this extreme step. He could be making his family and friends feel bad about not having realized he might kill himself, and not having prevented it. Without more context, there’s no way of knowing. As to the perlocutionary effect, I suppose that would depend on whether or not he actually committed suicide. Or would it? You don’t need to say or write the words, I intend to shoot myself’ in order to have the effect of shooting yourself. You don’t perform suicide in words, as, say, you perform marriage. The perlocutionary level of a suicide note is inseparable from the illocutionary level – its intended effect on those who read it. But that will probably be affected by whether you succeed or not."
