A história de instrumentos lingüísticos no Sul: o lugar de Celso Pedro Luft

Abstract

With the purpose of recuperating a part of the history of the process of linguistic instruments production in the south of Brazil, we worked with a protagonist who occupied mainly the positions of professor and grammaticist: Celso Pedro Luft. We will analyze his texts attempting to relate what they say with the production conditions to which he was directly or indirectly related: i) unfavorable public policies towards the German culture and language Luft was of German origin and had German as his mother tongue; ii) considerable diversification of the Brazilian society, due to the rising of an industrial bourgeois, the growth of an heterogeneous middleclass and the arrival of a considerable contingent of migrants add to this all the complications of internal public politics and the reflections of two great world wars; iii) diverse political, economical and social demands from educational institutions among these, the important movements related to linguistic studies about which Celso Pedro Luft had to position himself and the many attempted reforms and modernizations of the country s educational system. From the analysis of his works and their production conditions we are interested in interpreting both, work and life, as they are inseparable. Aiming at interpreting his participation in the linguistic studies as a historical development, we chose for analysis for of his publication, covering from the 1950s to the 1980s: Guia Ortográfico, Gramática Resumida, Moderna Gramática Brasileira e Língua e Liberdade. Having as a starting point the observation of all these facts, we attempted to go beyond the textual evidences, seeking to interpret and analyze the thought of Celso Pedro Luft in light of theoretical concepts from the Analysis of Discourse and from the History of Linguistic Ideas. On the other hand, we revisited the saussuriana and chomskyana base linguistics as they present the theories on which Celso Pedro Luft based his thought. Trying to synthesize in one sentence the theoretical question which this thesis attempted to answer, we came up with: In which way linguistic public policies are determinant for a teenager of German origin to become a professor of Portuguese Language and, later, a grammaticist, contributing through his pedagogical academic production to the history of the linguistic instruments in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, with national repercussion?