VERB-VISUALITY IN MAFALDA’S COMIC STRIP: LINGUISTIC COURTESY/DISCOURTESY AND HUMOR IN THE DIALOGUE OF THE FIGURATIVE NARRATIVE

Abstract

How to read a comic strip? What dialogical relations can such a genre perform, considering its hybrid nature of languages? It is proposed, in this article, to analyze a Mafalda’s comic strip, character created by Quino, as a discursive hybrid genre, observing the verb-visuality that constitutes the discourse, as well as exploring the meaning effects that arise from the dialogical relations. The marks of linguistic politeness and impoliteness present in the verb-visual materiality are also an object of this study. The theoretical foundation is the Dialogic Discourse Analysis (ADD), following the principles of Bakhtin (2010a, 2010b) and his Circle and Brait’s (2013), as well as Brown and Levinson (1987) as a ground theory to support the issues of courtesy; and Kandinsky (2012) to assist in the reflections about the pictorial elements.

Keywords

• comic strip
• verb-visuality
• linguistic politeness and impoliteness
• dialogical relations