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RESEARCH PRODUCT

A pragmatic study of nonsense, from Lewis Carroll to the Monty Python

subject

description

This dissertation consists in a study of verbal exchanges in nonsense literature, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and one of the two fathers of the genre, Lewis Carroll, to the last quarter of the twentieth century and his glorious heirs, the Monty Python. The corpus is taken from the whole of English-speaking nonsense literature, be it English (Lewis Carroll, the Monty Python, N.F. Simpson), Canadian (Stephen Leacock), or American (Robert Benchley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Joseph Heller and the Marx Brothers). As the title indicates, the study of verbal exchanges will rely on pragmatic analysis, pragmatics being the study of how language works as a practice, in social context. The main focus of the study will then be language as an activity in its own right, involving users, and dealing with utterances or sentence-tokens rather than sentence-types. The study will rely on the work of many different theorists (Austin, Grice, Searle, Sperber and Wilson, Leech, Ducrot, Sarfati...) and varied theoretical approaches (relevance theory, normative pragmatics, integrated pragmatics...) in order to analyse the verbal exchanges of characters who are fond of debating, conversing, arguing, listening to the sound of their own voice, giving orders, asking questions, or simply chatting within or against, but never outside, the rules of conversation.