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.
Funding source: Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación
Award Identifier / Grant number: FFI2011-24269
Funding statement: Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación, (Grant / Award Number: ‘FFI2011-24269’).
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Intersubjectivity and Materiality: A Multimodal Perspective
- Multimodality, Cognitive Poetics, and Genre: Reading Grady Hendrix’s novel Horrorstör
- Matt Kish’s “Every Page of Moby-Dick, Illustrated”: A Multimodal Approach
- The Participatory Stance of the White House on Facebook: A Critical Multimodal Analysis
- Multimodal Humor in Plenary Lectures in English and in Spanish
- Book Reviews
- Archer, A., and Breuer, E.: Multimodality in Writing: The State of the Art in Theory, Methodology and Pedagogy
- Koike, D. A and Blyth, C.S.: Dialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Intersubjectivity and Materiality: A Multimodal Perspective
- Multimodality, Cognitive Poetics, and Genre: Reading Grady Hendrix’s novel Horrorstör
- Matt Kish’s “Every Page of Moby-Dick, Illustrated”: A Multimodal Approach
- The Participatory Stance of the White House on Facebook: A Critical Multimodal Analysis
- Multimodal Humor in Plenary Lectures in English and in Spanish
- Book Reviews
- Archer, A., and Breuer, E.: Multimodality in Writing: The State of the Art in Theory, Methodology and Pedagogy
- Koike, D. A and Blyth, C.S.: Dialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities