Norma e variação na memória gramatical do Português como Língua não Materna (1662-1910)

Abstract

As far as we know, the first grammatical texts of Portuguese as a non-native language (‘foreign’ or ‘second language’) are dated from the second half of the seventeenth century. Since then, and until 1910 (terminus ad quem of this work), it is possible to identify a corpus of around thirty grammars of Portuguese as a foreign language, all written in English, French, Italian and Spanish by authors of various nationalities(Brazilian, Portuguese, French, Italian, English, Spanish and American) and published in England, USA, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. More than speculative and theoretical grammars, these works, mostly of a practical and normative nature, are adequate to the description of the communicative use of language, even though, more often, both grammatical perspectives – the speculative and theoretical vs the practical and pedagogical – give rise to mixed works from the point of view of their conception. This paper intends to analyze the multiple faces that Portuguese as a foreign language has acquired both in Anglophone context and in the framework of Romance languages, regarding aspects of their linguistic variation and standardization present in prescriptive works.