Introduction

Abstract

Roald Dahl's publications are also part of the corpus chosen by Cécile Poix to examine the concept of lexical deviance as a form of creativity in children's literature. Challenging semantic rules results in novelty and surprise in that genre, and the resolution of incongruity is at the heart of the humorous effect, stimulating the attention of readers, who are sometimes bound to accept incongruous language and linguistic incoherence to the point of nonsense. Poix draws on a collection of eleven British children's literature titles from the 19 th and 20 th centuries, from which she extracted 1,500 occasionalisms. She shows how children's literature's use of violated collocations, humorous schemes and tropes, and phonetic manipulations, which play on such rhetorical processes as addition, subtraction, transposition and substitution, partake of a linguistic strangeness that creates humor.