NOLLOPINGUISTICS

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The most interesting thing to observe about sound in this novel is how language breaks down as usable letters are stripped away. The fewer and fewer letters the characters have to work with, they must resort to sounding out words just as a linguist would – phoneme by phoneme. By identifying the nearest sound that they can use to represent the word they are trying to say, they are able to formulate intelligible meaning. It is fascinating to read the last third of the book and be able to make sense of what they are saying because, as readers, we are able to identify the phonemes which are most closely related to the original sounds in the words. This is especially evident with phonemes which have the same placement and manner of articulation, such as bilabial stops /p/ and /b/ and labiodental fricatives /f/ and /v/.

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When reading the many made-up words in the novel, it is also interesting to note that, most of the time, the way to pronounce them, including stressed syllables, is largely instinctive for a native English speaker. This supports the concept of “inaccessibility” in grammatical knowledge, or the idea that most of the language rules we use are subconscious but can be analyzed with effort (O’Grady et al., 2017, pp. 12-13).

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Ella Minnow Pea is a story about language breaking down one letter at a time… and taking civilized society with it. Just as with language, it starts at the phonetic level. One of the most fun devices in the novel is that whenever the next letter falls from the statue and is soon to be banned, the characters dramatically overuse it while they still can… and sometimes the overuse of a letter in a chapter is a hint that it might be the next one to go.