NINETEENTH CENTURY BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE: LETTERS FROM THE BARONESS OF GUARAÚNA AND THE EMPRESS THEREZA

 1 Doutora em Linguística e Língua Portuguesa pela Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho", campus de Araraquara (1998). Professora Associado A, no Departamento de Letras Vernáculas da Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa. Atua no Mestrado em Linguagem, Identidade e Subjetividade desde 03/2010. 2 Mestranda em Estudos da Linguagem pela Universidade Estadual de Londrina (2012). Bolsista CAPES. Especialista em Língua, Linguística e Literatura pela Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa (2010) e graduada em Letras Português/Inglês pela mesma instituição (2006). As with societies, history and culture, language also evolves, a process which is inherent to it. The Portuguese of Brazil has its own characteristics due to the influence of Indian, African peoples and others who have lived here. This study researched 19th century handwritten letters for the origins of Brazilian Portuguese. The corpus consists of three personal letters collected by the Museu do Tropeiro in Castro. Two of them were written by the Baroness of Guaraúna and one by the Empress Thereza de Bourbon. This textual genre is Revista Línguas & Letras ISSN: 1517-7238 Vol. 13 nº 24 1º Sem. 2012 a valuable source for socio-historical studies because it brings, through the linguistic register, an immeasurable cultural and intellectual legacy. Studying the educated Portuguese Brazilian language, used informally between 1880 and 1893, one is able to notice syntactic phenomena, which are found in forms of treatment and spelling diversity characteristic of the century in which they were written. Our focus was not to exhaust all the possibilities of analysis and observation on the origin of this entire legacy but to contribute towards the studies of the history of Brazilian Portuguese, and in particular, the one from the state of Paraná.

The manualization of linguistic knowledge and the constitution of a non-sexist language

Mobilizing the notions of grammatization (AUROUX, 1992) and manualization (PUECH, 1998), we analyze two manuals in this work: Manual para o uso não sexista da linguagem: o que bem se diz bem se entende (2014, Brazil) and Nombra: la representación del femenino y el masculino en el lenguaje (1995, Spain). Both handbooks propose the use of inclusive language in which the female genre is placed in evidence in linguistic usage. Considering them as a technological tool as well as a sociocultural product of popularization of knowledge on the language, we intend to analyze how the proposal of such manuals which uphold non-sexist language, inclusive of gender, supported by laws, edicts – operates as a language policy, which seeks to control the use of language, feminizes the language and meets feminist demands that clamor for a legitimate position to women, whether in society or in its uses of the language when enunciating itself. KEYWORDS: Manuals - Non-sexist language - Woman