Humor production in children's narratives in Spanish

• Published in: Calidoscópio (São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), 2017-05, Vol.15 (2), p.222
• Main Author: Ruiz-Gurillo, Leonor
• Format: Article
• Language: eng ; por
• Subjects: Analogy (Language change); Children; Children & youth; Corpus analysis; Handwriting; Humor; Linguistics; Metaphor; Narratives; Reasoning; Spanish language
• ISSN: 1679-8740; 2177-6202
• DOI: 10.4013/cld.2017.152.01

The aim of this paper is to analyze children’s production of humor from a linguistic perspective. Our research focuses on linguistic aspects of humor production and appreciation analyzed through a corpus of 148 narratives in Spanish about the same subject –a school trip to Mars‒ handwritten by nine-to-ten-year-old schoolchildren. Understanding humor as “the experience of finding something amusing”, the types of appreciation that children enjoy are: physical discrepancy; violation of expectations, rational behavior, and conceptual thought; production of linguistic rules in Martian language; and distortions/exaggerations. From this linguistic approach, these types of incongruity stem from logical mechanisms based on reasoning – analogy, coincidence, etc. – rather than on syntagmatic relationships, such as juxtaposition or parallelism, to quote but two. The children involved can use a number of humorous markers, including exclamations, and humorous indicators ‒metaphors and phraseological units, amongst others ‒ to narrate an adventure in this fantastic world. The present study would thus corroborate the acquisition of humor competence by children, based on the linguistic elements that they use in narratives.