ANALYSIS OF VERBAL HUMOR IN ARGENTINE COMIC STRIPS TO WORK ON LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS IN SOCIAL (PRAGMATIC) COMMUNICATION DISORDERS

Abstract

Humor and language are solely human characteristics. Important physical, psychological, and social benefits can be attributed to both sense of humor and laughter. Communication circumstances and user-related language difficulties have been named Semantic Pragmatic Disorder (SPD), Pragmatic Language Disorder (PLD), and, currently, Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder (SCD). The resources applied in clinical cases are selected by the therapist according to the possibilities they can offer for each patient. The purpose of this study is investigating select comic strips to use them as a therapeutic resource in the clinical treatment of language functions in patients with human communication deficits. This is a qualitative study in which comic strips by Argentine cartoonists Tute and Szoka are analyzed through discourse analysis methodology. The units of analysis are dialogic interactions between characters from a metalinguistic point of view. The categories of analysis are the language functions described by Jakobson. The linguistic function in which the language user’s discourse fell to could be analyzed in every comic strip. Thus, this resource is viable because it offers dialogs that allow the treatment of the discursively emphasized function. In the pragmatic disorder, the benefit of the clinical study on comic strips would lie both in the patient being able to identify the function, and in the humorous effect of recognizing it.

Language functions – Humor – Therapeutic resources – (Pragmatic) communication disorder