Protagonist language: texts as agents

ABSTRACT This paper proposes to discuss a social view of language in relation to the contemporary world, introducing the notion of protagonist language and text. Language and texts have an agentive force that acts through social agents. Protagonist texts present four characteristics: power to produce meanings and activate memories; portability in time, space and context; durability; and causal effects, drawing attention to aspects of the social world and constructing identities. We discuss the relation between language and society, examining epistemological changes over the last fifty years. The relation between language ideologies and discourse change is an assumption for the analysis of two texts about school occupation in Brazil, in a macro context of a neoliberal capitalist society.