Bilingual subjects and their relations with Portuguese as mother tongue: The Desire of Completeness and the Constitutive Lack

Abstract

The objective of this study is to investigate the relation of bilinguals, speakers of English and Portuguese, with Portuguese. Thus, I analyze the discursive clippings, obtained from the responses of ten bilingual subjects, to two questions: Which of your two languages do you most enjoy? Why? and Which of your languages is more important to you? Why?. The texts obtained through these questions are analyzed in order to find the representations that these subjects have about Portuguese and, therefore, show the eruption of speeches about their identities. I propose an interpretation of these discursive clippings theoretically supported by the French Discourse Analysis with theoretical contributions of the concept of social representations (MOSCOVICI, 2003; JODELET, 2001). I also support the idea of linguistic prejudice (BAGNO, 2002) that emerged in the participants' speech. Data analysis pointed to the fact that these individuals give to Portuguese the classification of difficult which is materialized when the subject, to justify his position, emphasizes the grammatical rules that, for him, are impossible to put into use. These statements seem to reveal the constitutive lack of the speaker, as well as his desire for a "perfect” language. This ideal language becomes part of the subject's imagination and he begins to desire it, and thus, his linguistic performance is seen as insufficient and incomplete.