ABSTRACT
It is a vexed question whether rules of grammar, or linguistic laws, describe properties of a language, or of all languages, which are real, that is which have real existence in language or in the mind-brain (to speak like Chomsky), or whether they are only theoretical constructs. The epistemology of linguistics, as of all other sciences, has its realist, and its constructivist, versions. Thus, whether the four levels at which we have accounted for ‘Jabberwocky’— phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics-are natural, or real, levels, or only figments of the linguist’s fertile imagination, is a hotly debated point. Although I sympathise with the constructivists, I do not intend to enter the field. What interests me is that nonsense texts treat those levels as natural. The texts can be easily analysed along such levels because they seem spontaneously to conform to them. And the numerous intuitions about language which authors of nonsense express, in their rare moments of reflection or in their abundant practice, confirm this-the texts not only conform to the levels, they play with them, or play one against the others, as if they were natural objects. I shall attempt to show this by reading another nonsense poem.
