Children’s humour expression through word formation in written narratives

Abstract

The development of metapragmatic competence is directly proportional to the cognitive development of infants: as they become older, a linguistic maturation takes place and allows them to use the language resources to consciously produce certain effects or intentions in their speech, like humour. In this study, we focus our attention on certain morphological phenomena such as indicators or markers of humour in Spanish such as appreciative suffixation or lexicogenetic procedures used for word creation within a narrative discourse - previously indicated to be humorous-, written by boys and girls of 8 and 12 years of age. On the one hand, quantitative data on the use of these resources and their distribution by age and gender are analysed. On the other hand, it is observed if these morphological and lexical elements announce or entail humour.