Overview
The first stanza of “Jabberwocky” is repeated below with the made-up words underlined. For each made-up word, do your best to identify its part of speech based solely on the text of the poem and provide reasoning for your identification. That is, if you say something is a noun, what clues in the poem are telling you it’s a noun? Provide as many pieces of grammatical evidence supporting the part of speech label you applied to the word. You cannot use only meaning-based arguments here (such as something is a verb because it is an action or it is a noun because it is a thing) because we don't know what these words mean. Various sources do attempt to give meanings for these words, including the character of Humpty Dumpty later on in the story, but 1) we do not know if they are reliable, and 2) as we have discussed, meaning based definitions can be misleading (tantrum is an action, but it’s a noun). But you don’t need the meanings; the syntactic and morphological clues are almost always sufficient to determine the parts of speech. You can include the definitions if you like, but they should just be treated as another piece of evidence and not definitive in and of themselves. If you do provide “definitions,” you MUST cite the source. Overall, you should treat this as if you are preparing for a court case and you are trying to convict each word of being a particular part of speech. Give as much evidence as you can identify. (If you are trying to get someone convicted of bank robbery, you wouldn’t want to only say that a witness saw him go into the bank before the robbery, but that he was caught on camera, the money was found at his home, his fingerprints were on it, his fingerprints were on the gun used in the hold-up, etc.)
Write your response up in the format of a (short) essay, with an introduction and conclusion and using complete sentences organized into one or more coherent paragraphs. Formatting note: it is common when writing about language to use italics to set off words when you are talking about them, rather than just using them in their ordinary sense: The is the definite article in English; the indefinite article takes two different forms--a or an--depending on the sound of the following word. You should adopt this convention in your writing. (Quotation marks is another common method of setting off such words, but this can become cluttered quite quickly.)
Be sure the work you submit is your own (AI cautionary note: Large language models are good and improving but they make mistakes and still have lots of trouble with metalinguistic discourse--using language to talk about language).
The first stanza is given below with the made-up words underlined. The entire poem is attached for reference. You must submit your response in order to access Module 3. (SSLOs a,e) 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. The rest of the poem is in the file below