Evidentiality and humor in Spanish

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to shed light on the evidentiality functions used by the comedian Andreu Buenafuente during his monologues in Spanish (2007–2011). Firstly, some hypotheses are proposed: (1) genre may determine pragmatic evidentiality functions; (2) evidentials are integrated into a monologue’s expository-argumentative structure; (3) several evidentiality strategies may be distinguished with regard to this structural role; (4) one of these strategies in humorous texts consists of acting as a humorous evidentiality marker. Secondly, reportative evidentials (Willet, 1988; Plungian 2001; Dendale & Tasmowski, 2001, p. 343) such as según, según dicen, dicen que (‘[they/people]) say’) and se ve que (lit. ‘it is seen that/apparently’), and a direct attested evidential, claro (‘of course’), are analyzed. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses serve as the basis to confirm the hypotheses posed and finally to propose a semantic-pragmatic framework for evidentials and evidentialty in Andreu Buenafuente’s humorous monologues. The corpus comprises 203 printed monologues from the books Sigo diciendo (‘I still say’) (2009), Digo yo (‘So I say’) (2010) and Hablar es gratis (‘Speaking is free of charge’) (2011).