Multimodal Humor in Plenary Lectures in English and in Spanish

Abstract

Humor is present in most instances of human to human interaction and has often been studied by discourse analysis (Long and Graesser 2009). These studies have taken several perspectives but have often ignored the multimodal aspect of humor even more if the genres selected have been in oral academic discourse. In this paper we focus on a genre that has rarely been studied, the conference plenary lecture. Taking as a theoretical model Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) we look at the semiotic resources employed by two senior researchers: one Spanish, Dr. Jose Manuel Blecua and one British, Dr David Crystal. They were plenary speakers in two different conferences. In their speeches Dr. Blecua dealt with Spanish as a Foreign language and Dr. Crystal with English as a Foreign language. Although there does not seem to have been any point of contact between them, their lectures show a number of similarities especially with regard to the semiotic resources they use in order to produce humor.