On the (im)probability of being an immigrant: a discursive reading of “black” and “white” in noun phrases in a Portuguese corpus

Abstract

In this article, inscribed in materialistic Discourse Analysis (Pêcheux), we intend to investigate how the status of “immigrant” in Brazil has being built by the language spoken in the country, allowing some to be designated by this noun and forbidding others. To do so, we zoomed in the oppositions / complementarities / combinations of the nouns “slave”, “settler”, “colonizer”, “mill boss”, “immigrant” with the adjectives “white”, “black”, “African”, “European” and its grammatical variations, by searching them in the very first version of the Corpus do Português, edited by the researchers Mark Davies and Michael J. Ferreira. On one hand, it was necessary to also think through how Discourse Analysis can articulate itself with Corpus Linguistics. On the other hand, we could come to fruitful conclusions that do not remit directly to immigration, but that say too much about how settlers, colonizers and mill bosses are meant in distinct materialities.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n42a893