O ensino empírico da língua portuguesa no fim do século XIX: a abordagem pragmática de Augusto Epifânio da Silva Dias

Considering, in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the propagation in Portugal of the positivist paradigm inspired by Comte (Catroga, 1977), the present work aims to examine how the empirical research perspective of the time plays a cardinal role in the evolution of philological studies (Santos, 2010), that aims to describe, according to a scientific method, the functioning patterns of the national language. This attitude, in fact, encourages the proliferation of grammatical treatises that updated the previous times methodology, based on philosophical speculations (Gonçalves, 2012, p. 2571). Given this assumption, we will present, in this research, the textual analysis of the injunctive volume Grammatica Portugueza Elementar published 14 times from 1870 until 1921 by Augusto Epifânio da Silva Dias (1841-1916), a positivist didactic resource that presents to the public, both scholarly and popular (Gonçalves, 2021), the phonological, morphological and syntactic rules for better writing and speaking in the mother tongue, applying the modern empirical approach. Indeed, the author provides simple and practical rules, of immediate understanding, whose memorization is provided, on the one hand, by pragmatic examples and application models and, on the other hand, by iconic didactic mediators (Damiano, 1993), such as diagrams, tables and word lists, strategies chosen so that users can fix the illustrated precepts permanently in their cognitive structures. Since the objective of linguistic positivism is to examine the actual use of language (Nigro, 2009), we will study how Dias meets this objective by completing the explanations provided with practical and intuitive application exercises, which help learners to either i) understand the enunciative context of use, or ii) internalize the norms in an effective and meaningful way in the encyclopedic memory, although still prioritizing the traditional deductive method.