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In:The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts
Edited by Esther Linares Bernabéu
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 335] 2023
► pp. 217–238

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Fictional interaction in children’s humorous narratives

 | Universidad de Alicante. Grupo GRIALE
Published online: 24 May 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.335.10tim
Abstract
This paper analyses the construction of fictional interaction in humorous narratives written by children of 8, 10 and 12 years of age, as compiled in the CHILDHUM corpus. These informants were asked to write a humorous story about an imaginary school exchange program with Mars. The analysis will explore the ways in which children shape their fictional conversational interactions with Martians, and how the data that arise can be correlated with the psychosocial and metalinguistic maturation of the children. This preliminary qualitative study reveals that children aged 8 demonstrate a certain degree of aggression towards the image of Martians, whereas this tendency reduces in the narratives of 10-year-olds. In regard to how they deal with the orality vs. writing opposition, the 8-year-olds essentially write like they speak, and once again it is by the age of 10 that a turning point can be perceived towards a higher awareness of the typographical conventions of the written representation of orality.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Children’s humorous narratives as a type of humorous genre: Bounding matters
    • 2.2Humour competence
    • 2.3Metalinguistic development: Metatextual and metapragmatic
      sub-competences
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Humour and fictional interaction in the CHILDHUM corpus
    • 5.1The role of humour styles in children’s fictional interactions
    • 5.2From the orality to the writing: Metapragmatic and metatextual ability
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (36)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ortega-Gilabert, Jose Antonio & Larissa Timofeeva Timofeev
2023. Claves del etiquetaje pragmático en el corpus CHILDHUM. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 96 ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo

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