How Much Nonsense Is There in "Nonsense" Actually? A Linguistic Perspective

Abstrakt

The article addresses the issue of nonsense, in a detailed and comprehensive manner scrutinised in the book Nonsens i zjawiska pokrewne. Studium semantyczne [Nonsense and Related Phenomena. A Semantic Study] (Wołk, 2014). The aim of the present text is to juxtapose elements that make it possible to determine convergences and divergences between the category of nonsense in philosophy and logic and the expression of general (more precisely: Polish) language, which undergoes linguistic research. The study focuses on a structuralist linguistic perspective. The analysis is based on a distinction which is crucial in the description of language: a term vs. an expression of general language. In line with this distinction, the rules of defining a word functioning in two registers ? in specialist language and in general language ? differ. This is due, among other factors, to differences in the functioning of such a word. The undertaken linguistic research is preceded by a theoretical and methodological introduction, the latter outlining the adopted assumptions and linguistic description methods, as well as the theories employed for the proposed analysis (including the concept of the unit of language). The results of the study, with a synthesis of relationships established between the compared categories, are presented in the conclusion.