CONCEPTUAL DELIMITATION AND SYNTACTIC TAXONOMY IN JÚLIO RIBEIRO AND CHARLES GRIVET

Abstract

Subscribing to Cristina Altman’s thesis, which considers linguistic historiography as “the history of a already established knowledge, metalinguistically elaborated and endowed with theoretical interest” (Altman, 2021, p. 29), this article proposes a linguistic-historiographical examination, in the terms of Koerner (2014), Cavaliere (2014), and Swiggers (2019). The focus is on the syntactic grammar of standard written Portuguese within a defined temporal scope, analyzing the natural developments in grammar teaching that took place in the 20th century. More specifically, based on the analysis of Júlio Ribeiro’s Grammatica Portugueza and Charles Grivet’s Nova Grammatica Analytica da Lingua Portugueza, both published in 1881 during an epistemological period known as Gramática Científica, the aim is to understand some aspects of the evolution of Brazilian grammatical studies from the late 19th century to the prescriptive guidelines prevalent in the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the delimitation of syntactic categories such as subject and predicate; coordination and subordination; sentence, clause and period.