The effects of the lack, excess and strangeness in the discourses about the Portuguese language

Abstract

In this research based on the studies of the Discourse Analysis, we propose to analyze how students from a Language and Literature Course of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (FURG) move their discourses over the Portuguese language. The corpus has been collected for nine years, always on the first day of class, when they were invited to write about why they chose to study Language and Literature in the University. Through this theme, the ideological issue, the power relations, and the senses effect present therein are observed by triggering three key concepts studied by Ernst (2011): the lack, the excess and the strangeness. Therefore, from the marks left in the discourses of those university students as well as from their identifications with certain discourse formations, gestures of interpretation are mobilized. Such will allow us to analyze the ways of saying and not-saying about/in the language and, ultimately, how the sense effects in those specific discourses are produced.