Machado de Assis e os neologismos de Castro Lopes: reflexões linguísticas em crônicas de Bons Dias!

Abstract

This paper aims to comprehend how Machado de Assis contributed to the formation of the literary genre chronicle in Brazil, utilizing its dimensions to testify about the proposes of the philologist Castro Lopes, a famous specialist of Latin of the late years of 19th century of exchanging some loanwords for new words based on Latin. For this, we intend to analyze three chronicles published over nom de plume and which authorship was attributed to the writer in 1955 by the researcher José Galante de Souza. The chronicles of the series Bons Dias!, published in the journal Gazeta de Notícias between the years 1888 and 1889 consisted mostly of considerations about major political events, which characterizes the three selected texts as thematically isolated. We investigated the hypothesis that the author of these chronicles, through an essentially rhetoric speech, tries to persuade the readers on a reflection about the Latinist’s idea. As basis for our research, we used Candido (1992), Meyer (1992), Moisés (1987) and Sá (1985) referring as chronicle studies and its configuration in the journals, understanding the genre as a social reflect of its time, as long as Lausberg (1967), to comprehend the techniques of Rhetoric in the redaction. We also subsided on Farias (2013), Granja (2000; 2008) and Gledson (2008; 2013) about Machado’s experience as a chronicler and the history of the source periodic, as so as the considerations of Barbosa (2007; 2011), Betella (2006), Bortolanza (1999) and Magalhães Júnior (1985; 2008), providing the study of our corpus.