Under the Tumtum Tree
From nonsense to sense, a study in non-automatic comprehension
Any informal discussion of a piece of nonsense literature produces highly varying interpretations which retain, however, a common core. It seemed, then, that nonsense would be a fertile base in the study of nonautomatic comprehension, i.e. comprehension where the word-meaning relations do not seem to be self-evident. And fertile it was! This monograph reports the results of a study into the nonautomatic functioning of the linguistic network which includes idiosyncratic as well as common, coded elements at all levels: semantic, syntactic, and phonetic as well as episodic. To carry it out, a number of adults and children were given nonsense texts to interpret. These interpretations were in turn analyzed as to the strategies applied toward the comprehension of those texts. Various examples of nonsense in mass media were also analyzed in the light of these findings.
[Pragmatics & Beyond, V:1] 1984. vii, 118 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 November 2011
Published online on 21 November 2011
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgments | p. vii
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0. Introduction | p. 1
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1. Nonsense | p. 5
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2. The comprehension of nonsense | p. 13
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3. Nonsense and word meaning | p. 27
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4. Children's comprehension of nonsense | p. 41
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5. The nonsense of an unknown language | p. 73
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6. Nonsense in our daily lives | p. 93
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7. Nonsense: conclusion | p. 101
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Appendixes | p. 107
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Footnotes | p. 113
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Ermida, Isabel
2020. Impoliteness in Blunderland. In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312], ► pp. 214 ff.
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