Semântica e enunciação: a designação da palavra escravidão em artigos do jornal Folha da Noite do início do século XX

Abstract

Slavery left marks that have not yet disappeared and can be seen not only in museums, documents and objects, moreover in social inequalities that we have today, in racism among social medias, in any type of violence, in slave work practices that still exist – although they are a crime, etc. Considering that it is in and through language that those practices are signified and perpetuated, this article has the objective of describing the meanings of the word slavery after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, presented in the newspaper “Folha da Noite” in the beginning of the 20th century. Asking for meaning is to observe what designates the word slavery thus identifying the meanings that surrounded and were silenced by the time of the First Republic in Brazil. This research development is based on the Semantics of the Events theory, an enunciatively semantics which dialogs with the Materialist Discourse Analysis theory. In regards of the analyses, the occurrences of the word slavery on the newspaper were selected and we observed through two textual procedures: rewriting and articulation. The analyses revealed a semantic relation between slavery and the republican regime – meaning The Republic as a white slavery. Moreover, there is a change of meanings signifying some practices at work as slavery.