New languages in 8 to 12 year old childen’s humorous productions

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the invented languages in 8 to 12 year old children’s humorous narratives. It is worth bearing in mind that, in general terms, the children involved in the research are in the phase of humour acquisition V Riddles and Jokes (McGhee, 2002) and that they manifest an evolution from the epipragmatic uses of the language, more automatic and memorised by rote, towards the development of a metapragmatic competence, more conscious and reflexive (Gombert, 1992). A quantitative analysis based on the variables “invented words” / “lexical creation”, “drawings” and “comments about the language” was carried out. Both variables “invented words” and “lexical creation” show a high percentage in the three age groups (8, 10 and 12 years of age), which proves that children appreciate humour in the linguistic rules and are able to produce humorous stories in which they describe the phonetic or structural aspects of the invented languages, problems of understanding or translation, etc. After the quantitative analysis, the incongruity procedures found in texts will be described. Then several epipragmatic as well as metapragmatic uses will be presented for all the three age groups in relation to these new languages.