A Linguistic Approach to Understanding Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• Main Authors: Yen, Chiahua, 顏嘉華
• Other Authors: Chen, Yungyu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/52023418916690109833

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所語言學碩士班 === 99 === The Linguistics Master Chao Yuen Ren criticized the book of the British writer Lewis Carroll─ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the “representative of nonsense literature.” However, we can read this book from the viewpoint of linguistics, developmental psychology and other scientific approaches to understand its literary nonsense. Roman Jacobson proposed this viewpoint. He said that “children’s borrowing is not a strict copying; every imitation requires a selection and consequently a creative departure from the prototype. Certain constitutes of the model are eliminated, while others are revalued. In spite of its dependence on that of the adult, therefore, the phonological system of the child may contain elements which remain completely foreign to his model.” Children neither follow the standard speaking type of adults, nor want to listen to adults’ corrections. Jacobson called this attitude as the separatist attitude, which is well known on various levels of linguistic activity, manifests itself in the child as well and leads him occasionally to a kind of particular language. Facing the Literary nonsense of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we can understand it from a linguistic point of view. This thesis argues that children’s speech should be placed within the framework of children’s language linguistics. In this way, we can understand the meanings of all the nonsense. We can read this book not only from the perspective of literary criticism, but also can from that of psychological sociology, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy; in this way, it would be a meaningful cooperation. At least from a linguistic point of view, many of the details this book describes from the language of psychology, language community, language-oriented, we can find that all these nonsensical words are meaningful. Therefore, even if it seems to be a nonsense, but for people who understand linguistics, this nonsense will be very interesting.