Humor production in children’s narratives in Spanish

Abstract

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.Keywords: humor competence, humor production, humor appreciation, incongruity, children.