The Illogical Logic in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Najah A. Almabrouk

Abstract
One Property Of Natural Language Is That It Has A Logical Structure. Logic In Linguistics Can Be Perceived As That Hidden Tie Which Links Linguistic Devices To The Semantic Meanings Of Sentences. This Qualitative Descriptive Case Study Tried To Shed Light On The Relation Between Logic And Language, Mainly The Logic-Based Semantic Relation Of Entailment. It Explored Logic-Based Semantics In Literary Texts Particularly Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece Of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. The Results Showed That Alice’s Utterances Alone Were Rich In Entailments With 46 Examples found Across The 12 Chapters Of The Novel. All Of The Entailments Were Of Syntactic Type Following The Four Logical Rules Of Inference: Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, Hypothetical Syllogism And Disjunctive Syllogism. Through The Use Of Entailment, Carroll Was Able To Produce Three Main Illocutions: Criticizing, Questioning And Emphasizing In Which He Remarked On Social Values, The Human Nature, Authority, Politics, Physics, Logic And Identity.

Full Text: PDF