Màster de Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2012, Supervisor: Dr. Marta Fernández-Villanueva
The joke is a genre of oral literature acquired during childhood and adolescence.
Together with other figurative uses of language it is bound to cognitive
developments. The goal of this study is analyzing some developmental aspects of
the written production of jokes and finding suitable coding categories for the
analysis. A sample of 234 multilingual children and adolescents from 6
to 16 years of age were selected from the CesCa corpus (Catalan Written in
Schools of Catalonia). They had been asked to write a joke or a funny situation.
The categories proved quite suitable to code types of responses in terms of
speech acts, types of texts, types of jokes, production errors and multilingualism in use. The results showed an increasing development by age groups and some u-shaped behaviors by age. We interpret u-shape behavior as a point of cognitive restructuring according to the Representational Redescription
Model (RRM). Regarding multilingualism, jokes showed more code-switching than
other humorous texts, but an increase of Catalan use and a descent in
code-switching. The study of joke production in developmental perspective has
proven to be a promising domain of inquiry deserving further exploration.