Lexique et langue nationale. Éléments d'histoire de la lexicographie au Brésil

Abstract

In this article, we consider the production of a lexicographic knowledge in Brazil as it is linked to the constitution of a national language. The corpus is made up of accounts by travellers, bilingual dictionaries (Portuguese-Tupi, Tupi-Portuguese) and monolingual dictionaries of Portuguese, written between 16th and 19th centuries. The dictionaries are considered as tools which are introduced into Brazilian space-and-time and produce successive transformations in the linguistic body. They also are discourses, and we study their entry-words, the structure and certain forms of their definitions. The article shows how, in the 19th century, the notion of "Brazilianism" plays an important role in the production of a lexicographic discourse.