Entre linhas e testemunhos: edição semidiplomática de manuscritos de comissários baianos do Santo Ofício e estudo descritivo de argumentos dativos

Abstract

This work presents, with the appropriate socio-historical, paleographic and philological controls, the semi-diplomatic edition of a sample composed of various documents, mostly epistolary, dated between the 17th and 19th centuries (1698-1809), with an emphasis on manuscripts from the 18th century. The edition and availability of this documentary collection – Manuscripts of Bahian Commissioners of the Holy Office – are part of the second phase of the project Electronic Corpus of Historical Documents of the Sertão (CE-DOHS), which includes manuscripts produced between 1640 and 1822 by different population groups born in Brazil, since 1590. The criteria for editing the documents were inspired by the standards of the Project for the History of Brazilian Portuguese – PHPB and the guidelines of the Center for Studies, Research and Paleographic Documentation of Memory and Art (CEPEDOP) (Lose, 2019). Our study also examined the dative pronouns, an internal argument of verbs in two or three places that can be replaced by the clitic lhe, in the second and third grammatical persons. Thus, the variations between the use of the pronoun in prepositional phrases and its cliticized form were considered, as well as the choice of preposition (cf. Oliveira, 2014; Cardoso, 2016; Cavalcante; Figueiredo, 2009; Torres; Berlinck, 2006, among others). The theoretical framework adopted is Historical Sociolinguistics (Conde Silvestre, 2007; Mattos and Silva, 2008a), which, through a quantitative methodology, investigates the internal and external factors that condition the linguistic variation and changes observed in written texts. The results indicate that the third person (singular) followed by the second person of plural are the most productive contexts for the use of datives. In the third person of singular, the predominant forms include the clitic lhe and the preposition ‘a’, which is a pattern also observed in the third person of plural. On the other hand, there are signs of innovation in the second person singular and plural: in the second person (singular), the clitic lhe, traditionally associated with the third person, appears frequently, while in the second person plural, the preposition ‘a’, the null object and few occurrences of the pronoun lhe are common. These results suggest a conservative behavior in the sample, but also point to innovation in the pronominal system with the use of typical third person forms in second person contexts (singular and plural) and the restricted use of the preposition para in the third person (singular and plural). Therefore, the analyzed data demonstrated that the most use of the preposition ‘a’, followed by the clitic lhe, points to a tendency towards conservatism and formality in writing. However, the presence of other prepositions, such as para and de, in the same contexts suggests that, already in the 18th century, it was possible to observe the variation in the use of dative complements in Brazilian Portuguese.