Nathan Go
Cinematic Arts (Writing for Screen and Television)
Essay: “Blend Structure in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’: Using Optimality Theory Towards a Creative Understanding of the Poem,” 2006

Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” perhaps the most popular nonsense poem in the English language, appeared originally in the Through the Looking-Glass novel. Using Optimality Theory, a linguistic model that studies phonology, semantics and syntax, Nathan Go’s extraordinarily complex analysis of Lewis Carroll’s own “blend structures,” or portmanteaus, such as chortle, frumious, and mimsy, reflects the exciting depth researchers have gone to understand better the rich use of language in the Alice stories.