Polémiques autour de la langue nationale (fin du XIXe siècle et début du XXe)

Abstract

At the turn of the century, Brazil experienced an intense and wide spread controversy when the "homens de letras" (educated people, writers, historians, grammarians, newspapermen, teachers) fought over the most effective ways of expression — especially in writing — in a Brazilian national language. In this article, we consider texts concerning this controversy such as surfaces texts which become, by mean of discourse analysis, a discursive space that enables us to understand the discursive processes at work in the writings of these authors, who where building up meanings in the Brazilian language. In this discursive game we can see four main lines of enunciation; by establishing and destabilizing meanings, there is built up a discursive memory of the national language: at the root of the process of meaning is the opposition, related to the Portuguese language of Portugal, between what was pointed out as oral language and what was considered as written language.