A ironia em curtas de animações infantis: uma análise multimodal em aquisição de linguagem.

Abstract

From an early age children use language, so they begin to perceive different linguistic resources and to position themselves before them. Furthermore, in children's speech, we find puns, jokes and even utterances with an ironic tone, among these uses of language, this work focuses on irony, since depending on its complexity, children can apprehend it and use it in narratives. The objective of this research was to analyze the irony in the narratives of children in the process of language acquisition from a multimodal perspective, in which speech, gesture and gaze coact in the linguistic production, composing the multimodal matrix of language. To achieve this goal, we created ironic excerpts in two animations that involved characters from the children's universe, then we presented the videos to five children from four to eight years old. It is a qualitative research of the type of research-action whose methodological procedure consisted of each child watching the two animations individually and in their home contexts and after watching them narrate what they saw to the researcher. The animations involve different characters from the children's audience and last from twenty-six to thirty-five seconds. Regarding the irony present in the animations, it was presented in several situations and was supported by the classification proposed by Muecke (1995): verbal irony and situational irony. We have adopted a comprehensive definition for irony, since we reflect it as an activity of a verbal and situational nature and which exceeds its standard definition of saying one thing to mean another . In this work, the conception that language is constituted by an interconnected set of different semiotic resources is admitted, being the vocal / prosodic, gestural and visual modalities the center of this multimodal matrix. For data analysis, we used the ELAN softwares for the transcription of vocal production, gesture and look resources performed by children in the narratives, and PRAAT for the acoustic analysis of speech. The categories of analysis were gestures based on the gestural dimensions (MCNEILL, 1992), in addition we included surprise as characteristics of the eyes and eyebrows (EKMAN, FRIESEN, 1975). The prosodic resource, considering the upward / downward intonational curve that presents the fundamental frequency (F0) and the plane of the gaze as an acoustic parameter, the eyes rolling (ROCKWELL, 2000; CONZ, 2010), a look up and to the sides. The results revealed that among the children observed, four were able to describe verbal and situational ironies in their narratives. Regarding multimodal identification cues, the data showed that in verbal irony there is a certain tendency towards debauchery facial expression (Marcos, 44%; Luana, 11%; Helena, 44%), whereas in situational irony, the reaction of debauchery (Helena, 100%) and disdain (Marcos, 33%; Graziela, 67%); the production leads were scarce in the ironic statement (raised eyebrow: Joana, 50%; Graziela, 50%) and numerous for the irony of the situation (fundamental frequency rise and raised eyebrow: Marcos, 33%; Luana, 33%, Helena , 33%, Graziela, 33%; look up and to the sides: Helena, 50%; Graziela, 50%). Thus, we show that each child relates to irony in different ways and that the family context, shared knowledge and interactive routines promote the path to figurative meaning.