The collector of examples: reflections on the status of the example from Said Ali

Abstract

In this article, we focus on a duel of titans, whose object of dispute is the language and whose arena are examples that concern the pronominal issue. Relying on the theoretical-methodological support of the History of Linguistic Ideas from a discursive perspective, we also make use of categorizations proposed by Auroux (1998), Marcello-Nilzia and Petiot (1997) and Dias (2007) on exemplification to reflect on the reading promoted by a Brazilian scholar, Said Ali, in Questões de Português (1911), a critical review of the work Os problemas da Colocação de pronomes (1909), by Cândido de Figueiredo, a Portuguese scholar. We go through, in the materiality of the exemplification woven from works by Brazilian and Portuguese authors, some points of a dispute for the legitimacy of saying how the language is, and we analytically recover stumbles, failures, misunderstandings and contradictions marked by reading gestures. In addition to contributing to studies on exemplification, our work also contributes to the history of knowledge produced about the language, especially in/from Brazil. One of the results of this work lies in exposing, based on this quarrel, how language, knowledge and subjects of science are not outside of history and, therefore, of ideological determination.