Hipossegmentações em manuscritos oitocentistas da Câmara Municipal de Rio Pardo (RS)

Abstract

The aim of this research is to characterize the hypo-segmentations in nineteenth-century manuscripts of the Municipal Council from the Rio Pardo City, in the Rio Grande do Sul, under the theoretical contribution of the Historical Sociolinguistics. Hypo-segmentations are a form of graphical variation, which consists of the suppression of white gaps between words written in a continuous way. We believe that the phenomenon of hypo-segmentation is a characteristic of the nineteenth-century writing practice of official documents of the Rio Pardo Council, and which presents a linguistic motivation of prosodic nature. The research corpus comprises 28 manuscripts from the 1912 Códice Geral of the council, collected in the Historical Council Archive - Biágio Soares Tarantino, and classified as a letter, receipt, court order, term of possession and provision. A facsimile and semi diplomatic edition of the texts are displayed in the first part of this research. In the second part, we propose the linguistic study of 410 occurrences of hypo-segmented forms from methodological procedures adapted from Historical Sociolinguistics, which include paleographic variables, linguistic variables, and social-historical variations. The results indicate that a hypo-segmentation, mainly a lexical word with a clitic, could be a predetermined form of writing and already fixed as the clerks' graphic particularity. In that case, a linguistic motivation for the phenomenon would consist in the fact of the clerk perceiving the presence of host and clitic, but verifying the prosodic dependence of the clitic on the host, thus recording a phonological sentence. This fact may be associated with the particularity of the practice of the clerks in written documents as far as it reveals the knowledge of the clerks about word boundaries and the clitic's dependence on the lexical word, marked by the absence of graphic direction between the elements. As the hypo-segmentation occurs in all types of documents, and the clerks show mastery of document structure and familiarity with writing due they deal with paperless writing of the functions required by the position, we believe in the hypothesis of hypo-segmentation as a characteristic of the nineteenth-century writing practice of official and administrative documents written in the Rio Pardo, possibly extending to other parts of the Rio Grande do Sul.