As Cartas Chilenas sob uma perspectiva da historiografia lingüística

Abstract

The dissertation has as its subject a historic-historiographic study about the Portuguese Language in Brazil in the XVIII century, in a document of textual gender letter. This document is known as Chilean Letters and Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, an arcadist poet, is supposed to be its author. According to the theoretic-methodologic orientations proposed by Koerner (1995, 1996), for the Linguistic Historiographic, we will examine the linguistic marks which form the Chilean Letters, using the context principles, stability and the theoretical adaptation. By considering the Chilean Letters in the gender letter, our support is Bazerman, who considers the textual genders as linguistic movements historically created by social groups, according to their needs in communication in the socio-interational process, which involves a net of speakers in a established community. The Chilean Letters, as we infer from the analysis, have the social role of being a communication channel between two speakers in a specific historical moment. In this sense, we can say that the Letters, because of being a satire, are also an accusation against the behavior of a politician. Tomás Antônio Gonzaga uses a pseudonym in the Chilean Letters, Critilo, and talks to another arcadist poet, Cláudio Manuel da Costa, whose pseudonym is Dorotheo, accusing the political activities and tricks of the boaster Minésio, who is the governor of Minas Gerais. According to the linguistic conceptions found in the Letters context, we can say that, in the XVIII century, there was the conception that the language should reflect the same logic of the thought, which comes from some classical philosophers, like Aristoteles. For History itself, not only the official event, the one created by facts of diplomacy and martial expression of a nation, but also, the peripherical events, which are not official, have got since the XX century, the historian´s attention. So, the aspects influenced by the language are the goal of the experts ´s investigation. The analysis of the Letters was done and we got some results; they are: - because of being a mixed work, the Chilean Letters show us a combination of two genders: letter and satire - The Chilean Letters, written in rhyme and in a poetic language, allow the author/poet some freedom, concerned to the Portuguese language spoken in the XVIII century, and make him use same logic of the thought