Quote 16
"Would it be of any use, now," thought Alice, "to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think it very likely it can talk: at any rate, there's no harm in trying." So she began: "O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!" (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen, in her brother's Latin Grammar, "A mouse – of a mouse – to a mouse – a mouse – O mouse!") (Wonderland 2.15)
Alice's humorous misapplication of her brother's Latin textbook is the first indication that the ways of communicating she's learned in school aren't going to be much help to her in Wonderland – although they are good for a laugh.
Quote 17
Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. "I don't quite understand you," she said, as politely as she could. (Wonderland 7.31)
Language is meant to be a communication tool, so when it fails – or actually hinders understanding – Alice is very confused.
Quote 18
"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don't know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate – " (Looking-Glass 1.40)
What Alice seems to be describing is the way that language can give you an emotional sense of something even when you don't understand all the specific details. In this case, after reading "Jabberwocky," she feels the gist of the poem – a man killed a monster – even though she couldn't define any of the actual words. This suggests that language has several levels; we could call them, for example, denotation (the dictionary definition of a word, its exact meaning) and connotation (the feeling and implications of a word). Alice also uses the influence of context to infer the meaning of the words in the poem.