COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE APPRAISAL ATTITUDES OF OSCAR WILDE IN THE LETTER DE PROFUNDIS AND ITS TRANSLATION TO BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with an investigation on the appraisal resources (MARTIN e ROSE, 2003; MARTIN e ROSE, 2007; MARTIN e WHITE, 2005; MUNDAY, 2012; RODRIGUES-JÚNIOR, 2016) used by Oscar Wilde in his manuscript De Profundis, in comparison with its translation into Brazilian portuguese. The letter, written on a given context of Wilde’s life, when he was arrested for having committed some acts considered crimes by the society of his time, presents many linguistic manifestation of evaluative nature. The aims of the study are: i) to verify how the lexical choices that express affect, judgement and appreciation appear on the source and target texts; ii) to contribute to the analysis of translations from a systemic functional perspective, especially texts that present evaluative attitudes; ii) to discuss the presence of the social subject Oscar Wilde in his letter De Profundis. The metodological procedures used were the comparison of the shifts of equivalence in terms of attitudinal evaluation (CATFORD, 1965; RODRIGUES-JÚNIOR; OLIVEIRA, 2015), the analysis of the shifts and the quantitative discussions concerning the shifts found in the corpus. It was possible to identify three kinds of shifts referring to the linguistic constructions of appraisal: the ones that do not modify the semantic meaning potential of the source text, the ones that modify the meaning potential and the omissions. The study has developed a new kind of equivalent shift category in the scope of appraisal attitudes, which is called Attitudinal Shifts.