A Morphological Study Of The Nonce Words In E. E. Cummings' Poems

E. E. Cummings is a distinguished exponent of American experimentalist poets. He celebrates individualism and rejects groupiness, so he is a self-styled poet. His innovations are mainly in form and linguistics; no other poet deals with the form and language of poems in the same way as he does. His daring experiments in the language of poetry not only broaden the sense of poetry but also increase its visual effect, which has become one of the focuses of study by linguists and won acceptance as a kind of wisdom.Leech pointed out that poetic language may violate or deviate from the generally observed rules of the language in many different ways; both the means of and motives for deviation are worth careful study. There are in the main eight kinds of poetic deviation: lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, phonological deviation, graphological deviation, semantic deviation, dialectal deviation, deviation of register and deviation of historical period.Lexical deviation can mostly be placed in the category of nonce-formation. A nonce word or phrase has been invented for a particular occasion and is only used once. Nonce word is not merely a minor element of Cummings'poetic technique. In fact, each of his poems bears the marks of this technique.As a branch of linguistics, morphology is concerned with the internal structure of words, i.e., inflection, compounding, word-formation. The paper is intended to make a morphological analysis of the nonce words used in Cummings'poems to demonstrate his unique word-formation strategies and their effects. It is the author's hope that the discussion will help readers have a better understanding of Cummings'poems.