O exame Celpe-Bras e o funcionamento do sentido sobre a brasilidade

Abstract

The topic of this dissertation focuses on the functioning of the sense of Brazilianness in the CELPE-Bras exam. We try to understand the movement of senses produced in the relationship among official certification, Brazilian culture and the circulation of brazilian portuguese abroad. We first observe how and why Brazil joins some regional and local blocs for economical or linguistic reasons, such as the case of its entry into MERCOSUL in 1991 or CPLP (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa) in 1996. We understand that CELPE-Bras plays an essential role in the context in which all these subjects are related. From this presupposition, we try to recall the senses on which the discourse of Brazilianness (ORLANDI, 1998) is based, as well as understand what legitimates CELPE-Bras to take these senses as a representation of Brazil and Brazilians, to spread them abroad. We intend to investigate what the place of CELPE-Bras is in this representation. We retake the periodization established by Guimarães (1996) for the process of grammatization of portuguese in Brazil, dividing it into four phases, besides the fifth period defined by Zoppi-Fontana (2007) from the reformulation of the notion of space of enunciation . We understand that this exam has a special place in the History of Linguistic Ideas (HLI) because it integrates the process of Brazilian instrumentalization by the diffusion of brazilian portuguese to transnational spaces. Last, we consider these assumptions to analyze two pieces of audio of the Collective Test of CELPE-Bras from 2010/1 and 2009/1. Moreover, we have taken the perspective of the Semântica do Acontecimento which consider historicity in the composition of senses and thus to pay attention to the marks of Brazilianness that integrate these textualities, such as beans and rice and cachaça . We analyze these considering their rewriting (GUIMARÃES, 2002b) which, under different views, promotes the derivation of senses of these names. The reconstruction of the different moments of this work allowed us to see that these marks of Brazilianness, which characterize Brazil and Brazilians, perpetuate a vision of brazilian portuguese and rewrite a version of the Brazilian history legitimized and spread abroad by CELPE-Bras.