Cartas pessoais de amor: gênero do discurso e estilo do enunciador do Sertão do Pajeú na década de 1950

Abstract

This work aims at the understanding of both the speech genre personal love letter from Sertão [Backlands] of Pernambuco State - Brazil, which were written in the 1950s, and its enunciator’s style. This way, it contributes to the dissemination of this linguistic-cultural heritage. The reserach corpus is composed by 22 personal love letters written in the late 1950s by two senders (enunciators). They lived in the countryside of Sertão do Pajéu [Backlands of Pajéu] of Pernambuco State, Brazil. These letters were made available through the digital platform of Laboratório de Edição e Documentação de Pernambuco (Ledoc) [the Publishing and Documentation Laboratory of Pernambuco]. They were scanned and transcribed by the members of the research project “Banco Informatizado de Textos (BIT): a constituição de um corpus de manuscritos e impressos pernambucanos do século XVIII, XIX e XX” [Computerized Text Bank: the constitution of a corpus of Pernambuco manuscripts and printed papers from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries”]. The corpus selection was due to its relevance as an object of remarkable linguistic-cultural value. In order to achieve the objective of this research coherently, we adopted theoretically and methodologically the Bakhtinian perspective and, more specifically, the concepts of “speech genre” and “style” and the procedures for approaching the research corpus of description, analysis and interpretation. The results were obtained through aspects found as recurrent in the speech genre, such as the rhythm, metaphors, the use of pronouns thou and you, the use of diminutive forms and the vocatives. These aspects materialized proximity, spontaneity and intimacy, as well as similarities to a poetic discourse. The reflections on the enunciator’s writing indicated relevant characteristics of the period - the 1950s, enabling discussions about the different angles through which the style can be seen. Furthermore, the recurrences of a poetic production, the resemblance to the postcards of that time and to concrete poetry has lead the research not only to strictly consider linguistic features for analysis, but to also take into account the broader context that involved the letters and its enunciator’s style. This allowed us to comprehend the enunciator’s style as constituted in relation to the world and to the other.