Cartas oficiais norte-riograndenses dos séculos XVIII, XIX e XX : constituição e caracterização de um corpus diacrônico

The diachronic studies marked the first decades of the 20th century in Brazilian linguistics, passing by an ostracism period after the 50s. Mainly from the 90s especially with the project, created in 1997, Para a história do português brasileiro (PHPB), which has systemized, in national ambit, the programme related to the area of diachrony the historical studies retake forces and have gradually increased since then. Our work is set in the new scene of Brazilian historical linguistics and it is associated to two research programmes: i) the constitution of a diachronic corpus; ii) the diachrony of text and discourse. As regards the first programme, we made effort to constitute a diachronic corpus of official letters about Rio Grande do Norte, we called cartas oficiais norte-rio-grandenses, written in 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The chosen for bureaucrat letters occurred for they represent a textual category very productive in historical contexts, mostly 18th and 19th centuries, in which the command of writing was the least and also because they bring, almost always explicitly, the information of where, when, for whom and from whom, as remembers Fonseca (2003). The rules for constituting the corpus were based, although not strictly, on the orientation from PHPB. In respect to the second programme, we set up on the ideas of coserian base came from the studies on discourse traditions (TD) (Koch, 1997; Kabatek, 2006) amongst which that the texts are shaped so as to follow their own tradition (Coseriu, 2007), and we turned to Diplomatics (Belloto, 2002) in order to do the characterization of this corpus by the application of concepts from Diplomatics and TD as well as by the presentation of the structures that form those official letters: their textual genres, a kind of TD, with their macrostructures; and some of their formulaic expressions (microstructures), another sort of TD. This stage of characterizing will pay attention, as far as possible, to the dynamic between tradition and innovation that happen in the actualization of those textual structures along the centuries. This work intends to contribute with the researches connected to Historical Linguistics in Rio Grande do Norte, more specifically the ones related to the constitution of diachronic corpora and to TD; and with the study of official documents, textual category about which there are almost no studies (cf. Silveira, 2007)

Construções com tópico marcado em cartas pessoais brasileiras dos séculos XVIII, XIX E XX

This dissertation is a research on the marked topic construction (CT) in Brazilian personal letters from eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The goal of our research is to verify if CT are present in the writing of Brazilians born in the centuries in question. Our research focus is based on the assumptions of generative theory (CHOMSKY 1981; 1986), which states that grammar is internalized in the mind / brain of the writers, with the emphasis on studies of grammatical change, as pointed texts by Paixão de Sousa (2004), Carneiro (2005); Galves, Namiuti and Paixão de Sousa (2006) and Martins (2009). Our corpus was extracted from Projeto Para a História do Português Brasileiro (PHPB) and Cartas Brasileiras coletânea de fontes para o estudo do português. We selected forty-six correspondents who should be inserted into the two criteria set out in this research: to be Brazilian and be born in the centuries mentioned above, so that we could find legitimate topic constructions of PB. This work is based on researches by Pontes (1987), Mateus et al. (2003), Araujo (2006, 2009), Berlinck, Duarte and Oliveira (2009), which actively support us in the study of this linguistic phenomenon in Portuguese. The results show that the marked topic construction in our corpus appear on the writing of Brazilians since the second half of the eighteenth century, while the typical constructions in Brazilian Portuguese locative topic, subject topic and copy topic - are already reflected in the I-language of the writers born in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth century