A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Approach to Humour in Conference Presentations: The Case of Autobiographic References

Humour plays an important role in human-to-human interaction and as so it has attracted the attention of researchers when analysing discourse (Kyratzis, 2003; Long & Graesser, 2009). Yet, these analyses have focused on conversation (Attardo et al., 2011, 2013), taking the point of view of semantics (Kyratzis, 2003), pragmatics and cognitive linguistics (Attardo et al., 2011, 2013). There are very few multimodal discourse analyses that focus on oral academic research genres in general and therefore on the role of humour in human-to-human interaction, in particular. To our knowledge, only Frobert-Adamo (2002) studies the use of humour in conference presentations. The aim of our research is to look into the humorous role of autobiographic references when used in plenary lectures in conferences in English and in Spanish. We have followed a Multimodal Discourse Analysis methodological framework on spoken academic discourse (Querol-Julián, 2011; Querol-Julián and Fortanet, 2012).