Evidentiality and humor in Spanish: About Buenafuente’s monologues

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the evidentiality functions used by the comedian Andreu Buenafuente during his monologues in Spanish (2007–2011). Firstly, some hypotheses are proposed: (1) genre may determine pragmatic evidentiality functions; (2) evidentials are integrated into a monologu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Revista española de lingüística aplicada 2020-01, Vol.33 (1), p.302-325
Main Author: Ruiz Gurillo, Leonor
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Argument structure
Buenafuente, Andreu
Comedians
evidenciales
Evidentiality
evidentials
Humor
humorous monologue
Hypotheses
Information sources
Monologues
monólogo humorístico
Pragmatics
Qualitative research
Quantitative analysis
Semantics
Spanish language
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Summary:The aim of this paper is to shed light on the evidentiality functions used by the comedian Andreu Buenafuente during his monologues in Spanish (2007–2011). Firstly, some hypotheses are proposed: (1) genre may determine pragmatic evidentiality functions; (2) evidentials are integrated into a monologue’s expository-argumentative structure; (3) several evidentiality strategies may be distinguished with regard to this structural role; (4) one of these strategies in humorous texts consists of acting as a humorous evidentiality marker. Secondly, reportative evidentials ( Willet, 1988 ; Plungian 2001 ; Dendale & Tasmowski, 2001 , p. 343) such as según, según dicen, dicen que (‘[they/people]) say’) and se ve que (lit. ‘it is seen that/apparently’), and a direct attested evidential, claro (‘of course’), are analyzed. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses serve as the basis to confirm the hypotheses posed and finally to propose a semantic-pragmatic framework for evidentials and evidentialty in Andreu Buenafuente’s humorous monologues. The corpus comprises 203 printed monologues from the books Sigo diciendo (‘I still say’) ( 2009 ), Digo yo (‘So I say’) ( 2010 ) and Hablar es gratis (‘Speaking is free of charge’) ( 2011 ).
ISSN:0213-2028
2254-6774
DOI:10.1075/resla.17037.rui