Mars is fun! On humour, appreciation and emotions in children
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25267/Pragmalinguistica.2015.i23.10Info
Authors
- Leonor Ruiz Gurrillo (ES) UNIVERSIDAD DE ALICANTE
Abstract
This paper has as its aim to propose a pragmatic approach to humor appreciation. Psychological literature has shown that children enjoy funny, humorous and fantastic stories. However, humor appreciation has been poorly investigated from a productive perspective. Our corpus is composed by 149 humorous narratives in Spanish written by nine- and ten-year-old schoolchildren. In terms of humor development, the informants of our corpus find themselves at the fifth stage of Riddles and Jokes (McGhee, 2002), which represents a turning point in their passage to transition to adult humor. In particular, children develop a personal sense of humor (Thorson & Powell, 1993) within which humor appreciation stands out as the most important mechanism. Thus, the types of humor appreciation (Klein, 2003: 7; Orekoya et al., 2014) will be described, as well as funniness, phantasy and emotions implicated.
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