Phraseological manipulation as a humour tool in 8–12-year-olds’ written narratives in Spanish (La desautomatización fraseológica como recurso humorístico en narraciones escritas por niños y niñas de 8 a 12 años en español)

ABSTRACT Phraseological manipulation (PhM) is defined as an intentional and recognizable transformation of a phraseological item with different communicative effects. The relationship between this linguistic procedure and the notion of incongruity — the basic ingredient of a humorous product — is clear. It is also evident that the appropriate use of PhM requires good metalinguistic skills, and this becomes relevant when dealing with children. In this paper we analyse the use of PhM as a linguistic device to trigger humour in 448 narratives written by schoolchildren of three age bands: 8, 10 and 12 years old. Our results are: (1) the use of PhM is scarce at the age of 8 (around 3%), whereas it increases exponentially in 12-year-olds (around 30%); (2) the qualitative approach reveals that children at the age of 8 make a rather epipragmatic use of PhM, which deserves some interesting observations.