Deaf Sentence by David Lodge Read Free Book Online

centre in the Lake District; the examiners’ meetings in the summer term when, sitting round a long table heaped with marked scripts and extended essays, they calculated and classified the Finals results like gods dispensing rewards and punishments to mortals; and finally the degree congregation itself, processing to organ music in the Assembly Hall, listening to the University Orator fulsomely summarise the achievements of honorary graduands, shaking hands afterwards with proud parents and their begowned children, sipping fruit punch under the marquee erected on the Round Lawn, after which all dispersed to a well-earned long vacation. He missed the rhythm of the academic year as a peasant might miss differences between the seasons if they were suddenly withdrawn; and he found he missed too the structure of the academic week, the full diary of teaching assignments, postgraduate supervisions, essay marking, committee meetings, interviews, and deadlines for this and that required report, tasks he used to grumble about but the completion of which, however trivial and ephemeral they were, gave a kind of low-level satisfaction, and ensured that one never, ever, had to confront the question: what shall I do with myself today? In retirement, he confronted it every morning as soon as he woke.
    There was his research, of course: he had envisaged that that was how he would mainly fill his days in retirement. But to his dismay he soon found that he had no real appetite to pursue it. He still 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 civilisation. 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 in recent times: historical philology was out of fashion and structural and transformational linguistics had lost their allure since people had come to realise 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, analysing digitised 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