The Historical Discursive Production of the Name of the Apurinã Language

ABSTRACT In this paper we try to demonstrate the material character of the meaning of the name of the Apurinã indigenous language from the traces of its memory space. In order to achieve this gesture, we have observed the premises of Discourse Analysis regarding the production of the meanings of words with lexical value. We have adopted the notion of preconstructed to characterize this value in light of the historicity of the word apurinã. Our corpus is comprised of texts about the Apurinã society from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. We have carried out a reading of formulations in which there were terms referring to this society and its language. We de-surfaced the formulations containing these references on syntactic levels for the consequent syntactic parsing of the noun in question at the level of the noun phrase. We have concluded that the name of this language is functionally preconstructed as a nominalized form that plays metonymically with the need for a discursive construction of the referent by the colonizer.摘要 本文旨在从阿普里纳（Apurinã）原住民语言名称的意义所留存的记忆空间痕迹中，论证该名称意义的物质性。为达成这一研究旨趣，我们遵循话语分析（Discourse Analysis）的相关前提，聚焦具有词汇价值的词语的意义生成机制。我们结合“阿普里纳”一词的历史性，采用“前建构”（preconstructed）这一概念来刻画该词汇的价值属性。本研究的语料库涵盖19至20世纪关于阿普里纳族群的文本资料。我们对包含指代该族群及其语言的术语的各类表述展开研读，并从句法层面对包含上述指代的表述进行表层剥离，以便后续在所涉名词的名词短语层面开展句法分析。最终我们得出结论：该语言的名称在功能上属于一种前建构性名词化形式，借由转喻手法契合了殖民者对指称对象进行话语建构的需求。