Aspects of linguistic form
In describing the grammar of a language, we are essentially trying to explain why speakers recognize certain forms as being “correct” but reject others as being “incorrect.” Notice that we are speaking of the acceptability of the form itself, rather than the meaning or function which it expresses. We can often understand a sentence perfectly well even if it is not grammatically correct, as illustrated in (2).
(2) a Me Tarzan, you Jane.
b Those guys was trying to kill me.
c When he came here?
Conversely, the form of a sentence maybe accepted as correct even when the meaning is obscure or absurd. An extreme example of this is found in Lewis Carroll’s famous poem Jabberwocky, from the book Through the Looking Glass. The poem begins as follows:
Jabberwocky
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
(Another five verses follow in a similar style.) After reading this poem, a native speaker of English will very likely feel as Alice did (pp. 134-136):
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
In the second verse, we can at least guess that the Jabberwock is some kind of beast, the Jubjub is a kind of bird, and the Bandersnatch is something dangerous and probably animate. But the first verse is almost total nonsense; the “function” words (i.e. conjunctions, articles, prepositions, etc.) are real English words, but almost all the content words (nouns, verbs, etc.) are meaningless.
Language is normally used to communicate some meaning from the speaker to the hearer. In these verses very little meaning is communicated, yet any speaker of English will recognize the poem as being English. How is this possible? Because the form of the poem is perfectly correct, and in fact (as Alice points out) quite pretty. Thus, in one sense the poem is successful, even though it fails to communicate.
Let us look at some of the formal properties of the poem which make it recognizable, although not comprehensible, as English. First, of course, the whole poem “sounds” like English. All of the nonsense words are pronounced using sounds which are phonemes in English. These sounds are represented in written form using English spelling conventions. And these phonemes are arranged in permissible sequences, so that each nonsense word has the phonological shape of a possible word in English. For example, brillig and gimble could be English words; in a sense it is just an accident that they do not actually mean anything. In contrast, bgillir and gmible are not possible English words, because they violate the rules for combining sounds in English.
In addition, Carroll has skillfully made many of the nonsense words resemble real words which could occur in the same position: brillig reminds us of brilliant and bright; slithy reminds us of slippery, slimy, slithering, etc.
Second, the sentence patterns are recognizably those of English, specifically of a poetic and slightly old-fashioned style of English. We have noted that most of the function words (the, and, in, were, etc.) are real English words, and they occur in their proper place in the sentence. Similarly real content words like son, shun, jaws, claws, etc. are used in appropriate positions. We can generally identify the PART OF SPEECH (or CATEGORY) of each of the nonsense words by the position in which we find it. For example, slithy, frumious, and (probably) mome must be adjectives, while gyre and gimble (and probably outgrabe) are verbs. (In Syntactic categories we will discuss some of the specific clues which allow us to reach these conclusions.)
Besides the word order, there are other clues about word categories. For example, we can see that toves, borogoves, and raths are nouns, not only because they all follow the definite article the (and perhaps an adjective) but also because they all contain a final-s which is used in English to indicate PLURALITY (more than one). This marker can only be attached to nouns. Similarly, the final-ous in frumious is typically found only in adjectives, which reinforces our earlier conclusion that frumious must be an adjective. And in the following couplet (from a later verse):
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”
the word beamish contains an ending-ish which is found in many adjectives; this confirms what we could already guess based on position.
Finally, the form of the poem as a whole conforms to a number of important conventions. The poem is divided into stanzas containing exactly four lines each. The first stanza, which seems to provide a kind of setting, is repeated verbatim at the end of the poem to create a frame around the story. The last word in each line, whether it means anything or not, fits into the A–B–A–B rhyme pattern typical of much English poetry. Each line has exactly four stressed syllables, with stressed and unstressed syllables alternating in a fixed rhythmic pattern. These features serve to identify this extended utterance as a coherent text, or DISCOURSE, of a certain type.
So, there are at least four kinds of formal properties that Carroll manipulates to make his poem effective: sound patterns, word shapes, sentence patterns, and discourse structure. W will be very much concerned with sentence patterns (SYNTAX) and word shapes (MORPHOLOGY), but only indirectly concerned with sound patterns (PHONOLOGY). And, due to limitations of space, we will not be able to deal with discourse structure here.
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