Referenciation and politeness in the (re)construction of self and of other: recovering the love story of Jayme and Maria

Abstract

This article purpose is of reconstitude the story of Jayme e Maria, loving couple from the Thirties, through the (re)construction of self and of other, in their love correspondence, which represent the corpus "Acervo Jaime-Maria ", offered in the virtual page Laboratório de História do Português Brasileiro (Labor-histórico PB). In order to fulfill this purpose, we used as support the texts from the referenciation and politeness theoretical fields, as well as theoretical texts about context. In our analysis, we discussed the quantitative survey of all expressions of treatment used in correspondence (a total of ninety two) exchanged by Jayme and Maria and we analyzed some excerpts from these letters which allow us join enough data to reconstitute the story of this couple. The results we found prove that the inferences amplifyed the text of discourse, which endorsed the recovery of the characters‘ story and, on the other hand, the linguistic politeness contributed to the interpretation of the data, which made the speakers‘ utterances more accessible.