Eu ainda son vivo: on the edition and linguistic analysis of letters by ordinary people

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Rita Marquilhas
Universidade de Lisboa
Portugal
Vol 1 (2009), Pescuda
Submitted: 04-11-2013
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Abstract

A 17th century private letter, written to his wife by a sailor who had escaped from a shipwreck in India, is taken here as a case-study. The idea is to build an argument for the archive search and massive edition of old manuscripts linked to the discourse of ordinary people. Such documentation is a useful tool for language historians since it belongs to a textual genre different from the literary and institutional data normally available for the study of language change. Cultural historians may likewise find the data useful for the study of creative and destructive tactics practised by ordinary people in everyday life. Finally, the philological treatment of such documentation allows one to ponder the capacity of textual criticism to deal with different texts, different readerships and different modes of publication. This paper also serves to present a research project: CARDS, Cartas Desconhecidas - Unknown Letters, which aims to offer both academic and lay audiences an electronic edition of Portuguese private letters written before 1900. The edition is also a tagged corpus, so that various hypotheses emerging from its reading can be tested, especially concerning the ways
ordinary men and women relate to culture, historical time and language issues. The letters are extracted from paper files in court archives being screened in an ongoing project. The editing protocol followed is compatible with both human and machine processing, while philological analysis of the texts takes into account the expected interests of different target audiences. The documents are also contextualized within the micro-historical setting in which they were originally produced, and labelled with linguistic and historiographical keywords.

Keywords:

letters, 16th-19th centuries, textual criticism, auxiliary verbs, indeterminate predicates, discourse and identity, Inquisition, digital archives

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