Diachrony of text construction processes in reader’s letters published in the state of São Paulo
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2024.v20n1a62794Abstract
This paper is developed within a diachronic approach that has been formulated as part of the Project for the History of Brazilian Portuguese. Such approach is based on Textual-Interactive Perspective and focuses on the diachronic study of text construction processes. The purpose of the article is to describe how the processes of topic organization, parenthetical insertion and repetition evolve in reader’s letters published in São Paulo State, and to propose a hypothesis according to which the diachrony of these processes is related to a historical change in the purpose and the style of such letters. The corpus is composed of letters published in newspapers, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The results show the following changes in these processes: expressive reduction in the percentage use of interpellation, a topic unit by which a writer makes a request to an addressee; drastic decline in the incidence of parentheses with focus on the interlocutor; strong decrease in the frequency of predominantly interactive repetitions. In addition, the results suggest that: the letters move from the purpose of discussing a subject as basis for a request to the purpose of discussing a subject in order to express opinion; the letters change from a more interactive style to a less interactive one. These two changes are argued to be among the motivations of the changes in the textual processes under analysis. By correlating these processes with purposes and interactive behaviors of the letters, the paper elucidates the intrinsic relationship that holds between language and intersubjectivity.
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