Abstract
Nonsense seems to break many rules of semantico-syntactic compatibility and somehow managed to construct discourse. This paper discusses the work of Edward Lear, the 19th century English writer and painter in a attempt to identify some of the linguistic and psycholinguistic principles underlying the nonsense text. It claims that nonsense relies on a "fuzzy" image—not meaning, but the suggestion of meaning or a feeling of sense, which results basically from the manipulation of the phonemic and lexemic possibilities of the English language and the exploitation of patterns of redundancy, sustained by a rigid syntactic and metric structure. It also suggests a relation to strategies of child language acquisition which would on the one hand explain the popularity of nonsense and on the other hand support the hypothesis that the origin of the genre is to be sought in the nursery-rhyme tradition of English literature.
Highlights
Nonsense seems to break many rules of semantico-syntactic compatibility and somehow managed to construct discourse
Often this biographical stance is related to the general uncertainties claimed to underlie the Victorian conceptions of liberty and social responsibility, uncertainties due to the rapid industrial and tecnological advances of the century, to the consequent social mobility and instability, to the economic and political theorizations which went under the ñame of free trade, liberalism and utilitarianism, and to the ensuing ethical debate which characterize
We find an unprecedented appearance of literature based both on "good sense" and on nonsense [265]
Summary
Nonsense seems to break many rules of semantico-syntactic compatibility and somehow managed to construct discourse. We cannot understand how his nonsense works or what it is trying to say, holds Byrom in his study on Lear entitled Nonsense and Wonder, which identifies for these limerick and poems meanings related to characteristics claimed to be part of the poet's life and personality, e.
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