Strategies to build humour. Rhetorical figures in 8 and 12-year-old children’s humour stories

Abstract

Rhetorical figures have been considered since Ancient times as essential resources for the achievement of verbal humor. In this work, we aim to verify how children aged 8 and 12 use rhetorical figures to achieve humorous effects in motivated narratives. To this end, seven recurring rhetorical mechanisms have been chosen to create verbal mood. Moreover, these are among the characteristic expressive resources of schoolchildren between the ages under study. They are: repetition, comparison, hyperbole, opposition, onomatopoeia, metaphor and puns. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of occurrences we wish to study the details of its use in terms of variability, common tendencies, progression in the way of expressing humor through the resource as well as the proximity to the canonical uses of the corresponding figure.