O humor verbal e o livro didático de língua portuguesa: uma análise do aproveitamento didático do humor

Abstract

This doctoral thesis develops considerations about the verbal humor and its use in educational Portuguese Language textbooks. The aim of this work is to examine the verbal humor and the linguistic mechanisms that cause it in order to verify how they were approached by these textbooks. Before this analysis, a brief exposition of the main theories based on the verbal humor (the one caused by the resources that language offers) is made. The relevance of the choice of the words for the humor text is also treated in this research. It approaches how the semantic (polysemy, homonymy, paronymy, synonymy, antonymy), semiotics (the role of the lexical and the linguistic-grammatical iconicity) and pragmatic aspects (presuppositions, inferences etc.) can contribute to build sense in humorous texts. As the linguistic phenomena do not occur in isolation, once they only materialize in texts, genres of humor, aspects of textuality (in particular, cohesion and coherence) and the relationship between reading and humor (such as the development of skills and competences of humorous texts reading can be applied to non-humorous texts). A brief review of the history of textbooks in Brazil is conducted in order to understand how the text of humor has being incorporated to this kind of pedagogical material. This research, through the corpus, seeks to observe how humorous texts are approached in textbooks: as textual genres or just for the purpose of exemplifying or as a pretext to teach grammatical content; if the verbal humor is used and how this approach occurs (if the expressiveness of the language resources is emphasized). The verbal humor offers rich material of the Portuguese language and it can improve this language teaching, which confirms the relevance of the present research