Linguistic Nonsense
     The Jabberwocky is a wonderful nonsense poem that, in fact, is not entirely nonsensical. With a cursory reading will leave one confused and oddly smiling at the funny and rhyming words, we can actually obtain a working understanding of the story this poem is trying tell. Through a phonological analysis we will be able to glean the pronunciation of some of the words, which is important because poetry should be read outloud. By examining the morphology of the portmanteaus, we will further be able to understand the meanings of these nonsense words. Finally, by looking at the syntax of verses, we will be able to validate the meanings with what parts of speech they correspond to.
     The poem is reproduced below for reference.

"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!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
(Carroll, 1998, p. 198)

     The first two words we can examine are “toves” and “borogoves” from lines 1 and 3 respectively. Based on the rest of the verses, we expect these to rhyme, but whether it is /tʌv/ (rhyming with dove) or /tʊv/ (rhyming with grove) is something we can speculate on. Syntactically, from the tree diagram below we see that a tove is probably some kind of animal:
where CP stands for Complementizer Phrase and IP stands for Inflectional Phrase.
     From X-bar theory we can infer “slithy” is an adjective, and because of the “helping verb” “did”, “gyre” is the verb. Therefore, the tove is doing some action, leading us to think it’s animate. The dove is also an animal and word initial consonant between it and tove only differs by a voicing, which suggests toves is pronounced /tʌvs/.
     Another angle we can take is phonological. Words that rhyme with “dove” include “glove”, “love”, and “shove”, and words that rhyme with “grove” include “stove”, “drove”, and “clove”. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any patterns; the only one apparent is that besides a double consonant preceded by a voiced velar plosive, double consonants prefer /ʊv/. The rest of the rhyming words seem to support this except wove, but wove perhaps follows the pattern forming the irregular past tense from weave. In this case we would expect “toves” to be /tʌvs/ and “borogoves” to be /gʌvs/.
     Unfortunately this is not the case, as Carroll (2012, p. 3) said, “...and "toves" is pronounced so as to rhyme with "groves...". Perhaps we could have seen this from “stoves” and simply removing the “s” in the beginning, but this is only one piece of data. In the end this just goes to show you can’t really define a “correct” pronunciation. Just because the author specifies it to be pronounced in a certain way doesn’t mean this is the only pronunciation, and some may find the alternative more intuitive.
     Rhyme-wise, toves and borogoves were the two main enigmas. The other pronunciations, such as “gyre” or “gimble” are not so easy to figure out, but from a linguistic standpoint the pronunciations don’t necessarily matter because either /dʒ/ or /g/ would be natural depending on dialect--though they would not necessarily be allophones because they are not in complementary distribution. For poetry outloud, then, the more important aspect would be keeping with literary devices: in this case alliteration. /dʒæɪr/ and /gɪmbl/ would not be correct then, as the “g’s” do not alliterate.
     If we want to delve deeper into the poem, we need to figure out the meanings of some of these words. Luckily, because many of them are portmanteaus, we can postulate the two words that them up and acquire a rough meaning. Through looking at phonemes, we may be able to find logical words that the portmanteau is composed of. According to Fromkin (2011, p. 272), a phoneme is the basic form of a sound that has a meaning. We will leave “brillig” alone, since there are no obvious components we can break apart. However, “slithy” proves more promising. Note that while we probably won’t find these words in a dictionary, we will take them as words with their own meanings since they appear in this poem. In that case, between “slithy” and “slimy”, we see that “-thy” and “-my” form the minimal pair. Even though this fact suggests “slithy” and “slimy” are similar in meaning (thus making it hard to justify that “-thy” and “-my” are phonemic), we still take them as phonemic since we expect “slithy” to have a deeper definition. In other words “slimy” and “slithy” do not have the exact same meaning, and therefore we do not violate the definition of a phoneme.



use morphemes and allophones to find what words the portmanteaus are made up of


Works Cited
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Wordsworth Editions, 1998. Print.
Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark. Tundra Books, 2012. Print.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language. 9thth ed. Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.