Júlio Ribeiro in the history of linguistic ideas in Brazil

Author(s)

José Edicarlos de Aquino

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2016-11-30

Examining board members

Carolina Rodríguez Alcalá; Christian Puech; Philippe Monneret; Luiz Francisco Dias

• Advisor: Jean Marie Fournier; Carolina Rodríguez Alcalá

Abstract

This paper analyzes the place of Júlio Ribeiro in the history of linguistic ideas in Brazil. Situated in the field of History of Linguistic Ideas, we try to understand how the image of Júlio Ribeiro is constructed as a founding author in the history of Portuguese studies in Brazil in three instances: 1) in the research carried out in the axis of the project History of Linguistic Ideas in Brazil and in the dissertations and theses that in recent years have taken the author as object of study; 2) in his own work; 3) in the work of subsequent authors until the establishment of the Brazilian Grammatical Norm in 1959. With this, we show how Júlio Ribeiro himself is represented in a Brazilian history of reflection on language and how he is incorporated or erased in the horizon of retrospection of Brazilian grammatization. The analysis of the whole Júlio Ribeiro's work allowed us not only to map his first positions on the study of languages and language; but also to publicize and analyze in detail works of the author unique in their genre in their time and until now completely forgotten ¿ two of them are: Traços Geraes de Linguistica, the first book of linguistics produced in Brazil, and Holmes Brazileiro ou Grammatica da Puericia, one of the rare examples of grammar directed to childhood in nineteenth-century Brazil. Besides, we have been able to verify how Júlio Ribeiro composes his texts with the use of third-party works in translation and adaptation procedures, and with the reuse of his own writings; as well as how the author countered the accusations of plagiarism aroused by these methods of composition of their texts and in reaction to their theoretical but also political positions. Deepening the knowledge about the linguistic ideas circulating in Brazil at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century, our work seeks not only to throw a new look at Júlio Ribeiro's work as a grammarian who adopts historical and comparative grammar, pointing to unorthodox interpretations; but also to draw attention to the existence of an important grammatical movement in Maranhão to be considered beyond the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis, for the analysis of the controversy between Júlio Ribeiro and Augusto Freire da Silva (from Maranhão), showing that the general grammar was also a model of scientificity in the Brazilian grammatization process of Portuguese. Furthermore, we argue that, besides being a grammarian, Júlio Ribeiro can also be taken as an author of linguistics, who takes up and innovates the questions of historical grammar, and also as a historian of the language sciences, who presents particular interpretations of the history of Linguistics, inserting the Portuguese language and the Brazilian indigenous languages in the general questions of the scientific knowledge on language in the 19th century. In the end, we could conclude that there is a contradiction between a double erasure of Júlio Ribeiro as a reference for performing grammatical and linguistic analyses and also most of his works in the horizon of retrospection of Brazilian grammatization and a historical discourse, supported by a reduced number of authors of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, which puts Júlio Ribeiro at all times in the first place in the history of grammatical and linguistic studies in Brazil (AU)