A philological and historiographic reading of the concept of grammar in the works of João de Barros (1540)

Abstract

The article consists of a philological and historiographical study of the concept of grammar derived from the Grammar of the Portuguese language (BARROS, 1540), whose author was the Portuguese humanist João de Barros (1496-1570). The excerpt from the text in question, on the concept of grammar, which is the first chapter of the work, is analyzed under the criteria of Textual Criticism, as a corpus. The analysis aims to investigate how the sixteenth-century grammarian defined the concept of grammar and to make an exegesis of his linguistic thought through the sixteenth-century description. The historical importance of João de Barros’ grammar is notable, as analyzed by Buescu (1984), considering the fact that it was the first grammar of the Portuguese language to grammatize the vernacular. The Renaissance grammatization model, analyzed and described by Sylvain Auroux (1992), applies to the interpretation of Barros’ work. In our considerations, we make use of the theoretical-methodological model and the conceptual apparatus of the Historiography of Linguistics (SWIGGERS, 2019), an interdisciplinary theoretical field that helps us to understand the history of grammatical concepts in the historical process. Our analysis of the primary source is developed by a digitized edition from the National Library of Portugal and by the transcript available on the CTLF portal (Corpus de Textes Linguistiques Fondamentaux), from the Université de Lyon, France.