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.

KEYWORDS:
Discourse; Preconstructed; Apurinã language

RESUMO

Procuramos, neste trabalho, demonstrar o caráter material do sentido do nome da língua indígena Apurinã a partir dos traços do seu espaço de memória. Para a consecução deste gesto, observamos os pressupostos da Análise do Discurso francesa quanto à produção dos sentidos das palavras com valor lexical. Assumimos a noção de pré-construído para caracterizar esse valor diante da historicidade da palavra apurinã. O corpus constitui-se por textos que versam sobre a sociedade Apurinã que vão desde o século XIX até o século XX. Procedemos a uma leitura de formulações onde houvesse termos que se referissem a esta sociedade e sua língua. Dessuperficializamos em níveis sintáticos as formulações contendo tais referências para a consequente dessintagmatização do nome em questão no nível do sintagma nominal. Concluímos que o nome desta língua possui um funcionamento pré-construído enquanto forma nominalizada, que joga metonimicamente com a necessidade de construção discursiva do referente pelo colonizador.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Discurso; Pré-construído; Língua Apurinã

Introduction

Contemporary to the classification of Amazonian ethnic groups, the perception of linguistic plurality in the region of the Purus river is evident from the first reports of travelers and explorers who ventured into this region in the nineteenth century (cf. Coutinho, 1863; cf. Chandless, 1866; cf. Labre, 1872). The movement of alterity between indigenous societies and Western society triggered the production of the first documents on the Apurinã language/society in this period. From these contacts, in which history is narrated from a foreigner’s point of view, new meanings are required to indicate the place indigenous people shall occupy in the project of territorial and economic integration of the Empire of Brazil. At this juncture, the emergence of a metalanguage to explain the language of this people occurs as a fact linked not only to the recognition of the Purus peoples, but also linked to an attempt to impose Western values.

From this juncture, the language originally spoken by the Apurinã people has been the target of different objectives within the scope of grammatical description: ethnification, proselytism, academic research and, more recently, teaching. The documents produced in the imperial period that provide meanings about this society construct their identity considering the idea of linguistic unity. The production of the first linguistic instruments - word lists, grammar and vocabulary - for the Apurinã in the nineteenth century saw language use as an instrument of ethnic classification and Christian proselytism. The image of linguistic unity constructed in these instruments is then processed in the transparency of a signifier: the ethnonym ‘Apurinã’. Therefore, the reference to expressions such as ‘the Apurinã language’ or ‘the Apurinã society’ results from events absorbed by the memory that hides what determines them. It is, thus, a name of a language that is read contemporaneously as evidence of the idea of an indigenous people’s linguistic unity.

Over time, the name of this indigenous language was recorded by different graphic forms: Aporiná, Ipuriná, Hypuriná, Apurinã, etc. These forms stabilize the meaning of language as a cultural artifact in relation to an autochthonous people of the Northern region of Brazil. The titles of the three grammars below, with different theoretical affiliations, illustrate the process by which Ipuriná/Apurinã fits syntactically, with metalinguistic meaning:

A Grammar and a Vocabulary of the Ipuriná Language, Polak (1894).

Apurinã Grammar: Preliminary Version, Pickering (1971).

The Language of the Apurinã People of Brazil (Maipure/Arawak), Facundes (2000).

In these titles, Ipuriná/Apurinã gives specificity to the ideas of grammar, language and people. A current specification of the meanings of these three enunciations is forged from the encounter of linguistic and ethnographic knowledge. This intersection points to the fact that they underlie the textualization of expressions such as Ipuriná Language, Apurinã Grammar and Language of the Apurinã People, discursive processes of meaning production that can be reconstituted.

Reflecting on this historical determination of meaning, in this paper we will focus on the discursive production of the name of the language of an indigenous society marginally inserted in the Brazilian scenario. In other words, we will try to show how the reference to the word apurinã was constructed and established as the name of a language of an indigenous society over time. In this trajectory, we will reflect on how the naming of the Apurinã language/society is linked to the need for a discursive construction of the referent on the part of the colonizer, along with the need to constitute a linguistic knowledge about the language of this people.

Thus, through the analysis of travelers’ accounts, grammars, vocabularies and dictionaries, we will attempt to describe the subjective effect of anteriority and exteriority that supports the readability of the name of a language upon which the work of grammatical description of the Apurinã language is contemporaneously based.

We assume that the name of a language emerges intradiscursively as an element associated with other “form […] of stabilisation which produce the subject” (PÊCHEUX, 1982, p.112).¹³ Thus, considering that the meaning of the name of a language “does not exist ‘in itself’ […] but is determined by the ideological positions brought into play in the socio-historical process” (PÊCHEUX, 1982, p.111),¹⁴ we raise the following questions:

1. How does the word apurinã historically acquire meanings in relation to other words and expressions?

2. In which way does a given lexical item start to be taken transparently in the domain of metalanguage as naming of a language?

Given the articulation of these questions, the answers to demonstrate the material character of the meaning of the name of a language can be sketched by the reconstitution of the traces of its memory space. That is, by what is anterior and external to the production and interpretation of a historically attested linguistic sequence.

Along these lines, we consider that the presence of the word apurinã in distinct discursive surfaces is linked to a reformulation system without which its mention would not be possible to refer to a society, and the language spoken by it. This is because it is necessary that there should be a memory ballast as principle of readability of such a word - a movement of ideology as a network of meanings by which the word apurinã has stabilized in the grammatical descriptions under the aegis of linguistics after the second half of the twentieth century.

1 Theoretical-Methodological Orientations

Our corpus consists of a set of four texts produced from heterogeneous ideological positions: i) the report of the exploration of the Purus River by J. M. da Silva Coutinho presented in 1863 to the president of the Province of Amazonas; ii) the travel account of naturalist W. Chandless published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1866; iii) the 1894 grammar and vocabulary of Ipuriná by the Anglican missionary Polak; and iv) the descriptive grammar of Apurinã by the linguist Sidney Facundes, published in 2000. A textual production scale is thus confronted over a long period of time to observe the historical-discursive determinations of the naming of an autochthonous language of the Brazilian Amazon. The voice of the natives in these documents is only demonstrated by oral examples that are the raw material for the making of grammars and vocabularies.

For a non-subjective reading of this corpus, in answering questions (i) and (ii) above, we follow the assumptions of Discourse Analysis that explain the relationship between Interdiscourse and intradiscourse from the articulation between the ENUNCIATION (represented by [E]) at the interdiscursive level and the FORMULATION¹⁵ (represented by [e]) at the intradiscursive level. We consider, therefore, to arrive at a description of the discursive process of constitution of apurinã as the semantic equivalent of ‘people’ and ‘language’, the linguistic desuperficialization of the formulations for their consequent desyntagmatization as discursive objects placed in relation with each other.

This procedure led to the extraction of [e] from the mentioned documents, taking the lexical item that points to a reference of the language and the society in question as an entry. In Coutinho (1863), we identified the lexical item on the graphic register ipuriná. In Chandless (1866), we identified the item under the record hypuriná. In Polak (1894), under the register ipuriná. And, finally, in Facundes (2000), apurinã. Considering the possibilities of interpreting this item in the documents, a network of [e]s was created for the analysis of the syntactic mechanisms and, consequently, of the discursive process of production of its meanings in the reflection on the language of this society.

It is important to justify that the choice of this item as input for the selection of [e]s is mediated by transparency effect. It is already taken as a dictionary term that presents itself in an evident way. In this way, our aim is to ‘break’ the obvious interpretation of its meanings by the subject in order to characterize the material process of its production in the actuality of any enunciation. We even acknowledge, by encircling the constitution of these meanings, the incessant reconfiguration of the domain of knowledge of any system of reformulation-paraphrase by its relationship with Interdiscourse. This means that we consider the enunciative heterogeneity of each apprehended [e] as a linguistically desuperficialized object.

The adopted procedure thus instrumentalizes a reading of the constituent traces of the memory space that engenders the meanings of the word in question. It explores the subjective effect of anteriority and exteriority evoked by the use of this word throughout the process of producing knowledge about the Apurinã and their language.

In technical terms, we believe that the historical production of the meanings of apurinã can be explained by the notion of preconstructed (PÊCHEUX, 1982).¹⁶ A pre-constructed element represents the effect of anteriority and exteriority of the meanings that underlie a word or phrase in a given enunciation/formulation. Preconstructed explains thus the discursive functioning of a word as an effect of meaning among the subjects of the enunciation. When we speak, we do not deal with the object of the world itself, but with a symbolic representation of this object that sustains itself by a series of non-sayings. Thus, since it is a word with stabilized interpretations, the meanings of apurinã can be analyzed by their relationship with the interdiscourse on its margins. That is, the specific exterior from which its embedding in any linguistic surface - intradiscourse of [e] - exists by inequality, contradiction or subordination to the meanings of other words and expressions. It is a discursive process that can be characterized from a series of previous enunciations that function as the space of memory of the actuality of a linguistic sequence in which apurinã is read like evidence. In other words, the syntagmatization of such a word has to do with non-sayings¹⁷ presumably retrievable by archival work.

2 Analyses

2.1 The Meaning of the Word Ipuriná in the Intradiscourse of Coutinho’s Report (1863)

The first written record of the name to designate the Pupỹkarywakury society¹⁸ appears in the report of Matos¹⁹ from 1845. It is the word aporiná used as ethnonym. In Coutinho’s report of 1863, this designation is retrieved as ipuriná in the geographical description of the Purus without, however, sliding to naming the language spoken by this society. The name of the language was not evident, that is, a pure already-said, an effect of preconstructed interdiscourse.

A chain of meanings underlies the production-reading of a formulation for each element that constitutes it. Nevertheless, these prior and external meanings of the linguistic production of each syntagma of the formulation are covered for the subject. Everything is not said “for there is an impossible peculiar to language” (MILNER, 1990, p.51).²⁰ Thus, at the level of the horizontal surface connections, the interpretation of ipuriná in Coutinho (1863) is based on effects of already crystallized meanings of verbs, complements and adjuncts that point to human actions that characterized the “tribal” life. This can be illustrated by the following relations between the verbal phrases (VP) and the word ipurinás in the report:

The actions expressed by the verbs, on the surfaces of Table 1, present arguments to the right that express aspects of the social organization of the Apurinã subject. The meanings raised in these VPs condition the reading of ipuriná to properties of ‘individuals’, of ‘persons’, of ‘people’, etc. However, this relation of signification based on a purely syntagmatic perception gives only the starting point to specify the historicity of the name ipuriná in relation to the meanings of ‘indigenous individual’ or ‘indigenous society’.

Table 01
Syntagmatic relation Ipuriná - VP in Coutinho (1863)

[NP]	[VP]
Os ipurinás (The ipurinás)	encontram-se distribuídos em grande número de malocas. (are distributed in a great number of malocas9)
	pintam-se para os combates com toda galhardia. (paint themselves for the fights with much bravery)
	empenharam-se para destruir aquela tribo antipática. (strived to destroy that unfriendly tribe)
	vivem entre os Pamarys. (live among the Pamarys)

Source

Still on the syntagmatic relations axis, the name ipuriná in the report is mainly found in the head position (N’) of a noun phrase (NP) as semantic equivalent of ‘people’ or ‘tribe’. To exemplify this, we have the following highlights with emphasis on the N’ of the NPs in italics:

As can be verified, the interpretation of ipurinás in the position of head of the NP is produced by the transparency effect based on the literality of the signifier. However, for the [e]s read in Coutinho (1863), the transparency of this noun in this syntagmatic position can be thought of as interdiscursively determined by its relation of substitution between discursive elements of other texts/authors.

Consequently, in front of the possibilities of paradigmatic substitution, a specific order of meanings intervenes in the evident reading of ipuriná as the N’ of an NP. These are lexical elements, with a referential meaning, that remain as traces of interdiscourse in the rewriting of Coutinho’s co-text (1863); elements that point to the successive determinations of the process of reformulation-paraphrase that sustains the ethnic meaning of ipuriná in this author’s time. In this process, ipuriná, as a nominalized form established relatively to its function in the AdjP, is the index of the contact of the report with an exterior that is specific to it. In [e] 4 , [e] 5 and [e] 6 , below, ipuriná appears qualifying nouns as ‘boys’, ‘tribe’ and ‘Indians’:

Syntactically, the three phrases highlighted above have the meaning of their nominal heads [boys], [tribe], and [Indians] specified by the function of ipuriná as a qualifier with no referential denotation²¹. One can speak of the delimitation of the ‘ethnic’ meaning of the generic categories represented by ‘boys’, ‘tribe’ and ‘Indians’. Ipuriná qualifies these nouns in those occurrences by giving them an ethnic trait.

The embedding of ipuriná in structures of the type [NP [Det [N’]]] or [NP [Det] [N’ [AdjP] [N]] in Coutinho (1863) indicates its preconstructed character as an ethnonym for possibilities of oriented substitution among alternates. The extern relations that generate the meaning of this word as an ethnonym are established by metonymy from elements of its interdiscourse. Thus, in a reformulation of the type “The Apurinãs refer to this festival as “xingané”” (FACUNDES, 2000, p.25), apurinã already naturally possesses the specificity of an individual or collective identity. This word subsumes in its syntagmatization in [NP [Det [N’]]] all the other meanings of more generic categories, which can be read since Matos (1845), such as ‘Indian’, ‘soul’, ‘tribe’, ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘errant’, among others.

The specific exterior of Coutinho’s [e]s in which one has such an ethnonym also puts into play the relation of ipuriná with the name of the other ethnic groups in the region. All equally signifying an ‘indigenous tribe/person’ of the Purus basin, whose customs are described throughout the report. Therefore, these memory traces, by which the sense of ipuriná is constituted as the equivalent of ‘people’ or ‘individual’, refer to the space of the unsaid of the analyzed [e]s. In other words, the conditions of the production and interpretation of these [e]s in which this word becomes effective as head of a nominal or adjectival phrase lies in the relation with the historical existence of the meanings of the names to other ethnic groups like ‘Pamarys’, ‘Catauixis’, ‘Ubaias’ etc., which also intervene semantically as an interdiscursive body of traces.

In spite of the characterization of the discourses by which one can relate the sense of ipuriná as equivalent of ‘people’ in the text of Coutinho (Cf. 1863), we emphasize an important relation of substitutability concerning the current interpretations at that time regarding the element ‘Indian’, materialized in the description of Matos’ report (1845); namely of the regularity of the expressions “indigenous [...] already domesticated” (MATOS, 1845, p.168)²² and “Indians [...] still wild” (MATOS, 1845, p.168)²³ that lead the interpretation on the ethnic diversity from the rivers of the Amazon, in which the autochthonous societies of the Purus are found. A hierarchical scale of values whose effects intervene in the metonymic constitution of ipuriná in the head positions of NPs and AdjPs in Coutinho.

The ethnic sense of this word comes therefore from the relations of meaning maintained with a specific exterior circumscribed to the conjuncture of the Empire of Brazil. In this conjuncture, the meanings that circulate for ‘Indian’, ‘tribe’, ‘maloca’, names of other ethnicities, etc., behave as conditions of production of ipuriná. They are words and expressions that occasionally appear as elements of reinterpretation on the surface of the analyzed text. The effect of the meaning of a word in the actuality of an enunciation is given by means of a reformulation that maintains the space of substitution that sustains its reading forgotten-covered. Thus, there is only repetition of the ethnic sense of ipuriná in function of a path of memory that causes its signifier, when resumed, to “mean what it says” (PÊCHEUX, 1982, p.111)²⁴ becoming “the evidentness with which ‘everyone knows’” (PÊCHEUX, 1982, p.111).²⁵

2.2 The Meaning of the Word Hypuriná in the Intradiscourse of Chandless’s Account (1866)

Chandless’s account, published under the title ‘Ascent of the River Purûs’ in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1866, results from an unofficial expedition carried out during the Imperial Government of Brazil (LINK, 2016). It presents the first cartographic study of this river based on astronomical observations, as well as lists of words of some native languages, among which the Apurinã. Its central objective is the description of the navigability conditions of the Purus River and its descriptions of the populations living there were made laterally through a relational view of territoriality and language in the nineteenth century.

This text is structured in relation to the discourses of four previous official exploratory voyages. Chandless (1866) mentions information from these journeys under a constitutive heterogeneity²⁶, without linguistically marking the sources by which he comes to know them - a form of enunciative alterity by which traces of memory of the specific exterior that plays with the production and interpretation of hypuriná can be traced.

From the analysis of the relationship of meaning between Chandless’s syntagmatic elements (1866), the same identity of meaning is seen as read in Coutinho (1863) and Matos (1845). Among the linguistic surfaces extracted from that text, the word hypuriná appears embedded as a grammatical subject and verbs link it to human predicates, as interpreted in the following table of relations between NP and VP:

Table 2
Syntagmatic relation Hypurinás - VP in Chandless (1866)

[NP]	[VP]
The Hypurinás	wear tanga.
	have a festival.
	paints themselves.
	did seize their bows.
	showed us a plank.

Source

Table 03
Syntagmatic relation Ipuriná - VP in Polak (1894)

[NP]	[VP]
The Ipuriná(s)	have peeped out of their seclusion.
	are susceptible of good impressions.
	simply says 'píta itú nitŷ'rŷta'.24
	is printed in italics.

These syntagmatic connections produce a grammatical subject with meaning of individuals who ‘perform festival’, ‘dress’, ‘paint themselves’, etc. That is, human behaviors and attitudes. An interpretation that by itself does not fulfill the conditions for explaining the historical construction of hypuriná as a semantic equivalent of ‘people’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘person’, since such an interpretation is based on the perception of a surface unrelated to any paradigmatic verticality that points to interdiscourse. This represents the fact that a reader in a situation of receiving this text becomes subject - “hostage” - of its meanings without being aware of all the discursive determinations that underlie it - a process of producing a sequence from the forgetfulness inherent to discourse. On this point, we consider the definition of forgetfulness as a psychoanalytic condition of the enunciation by the subject. We only say affected by a double conditioning of ideology as the unconscious: (i) covering of the discrepancy between discursive formations and, (ii) covering of the relations of the paraphrase of the concrete sequence.

Thus, the ethnic sense of hypuriná in relation to the verbs that bind them to human predicates is established in all the occurrences of its lexical-syntactic articulation in the structure [NP [N’]] with the same meaning as attributed to ‘aporiná’ in Matos (1845) and ‘ipuriná’ in Coutinho (1863).

The mechanism that endows the word hypuriná of ​​this meaning in the actuality of the enunciations in Chandless is, therefore, more than the interphrastic relation among syntactic constituents in the syntagmatic succession. It is, above all, a discursive process characterized by preexisting semantic rules that would be nothing more than the contradictory articulation between the discursive elements of the system of relations of substitutions prior to the text of the traveler. What in Courtine’s terms (2009, p.99) would be the relations of meaning that a word maintains with the “domain of knowledge which is its own”.²⁷ Therefore, the production of the meaning of hypuriná is related to an interdiscursivity which furnishes the elements prior to the enunciative action of the traveler. Thus, one has the meaning of hypuriná in the account by reference for the meanings of ‘Indians’, ‘indigenous’, ‘tribe’, ‘nation’, ‘savages’, ‘domesticated’, etc. Some of which remain as elements of rewriting in the text, others, however, remain in the “rejection zone” (PÊCHEUX; FUCHS, 2014, p.175).²⁸ Thus, the interpretation of hypuriná results from the part-whole relation that it maintains with these preexisting discursive elements.

From the semantic domain of hypuriná in the rewriting of this account, whose meaning is given in relation to items such as ‘tribe’, ‘indians’, ‘maloca’, names of ethnicities, etc., it is only read as an ethnonym. There is in it, moreover, the embedding of hypuriná as an adjective in the structure [NP [Det] [N’ [AdjP] [N]], qualifying and determining generic nouns as read in the text by Coutinho (1863) in which there are expressions like ‘ipuriná boys’, ‘ipuriná tribe’ and ‘ipuriná Indians’. In other words, this word is not read in this account as a term of the NP taken without referential meaning, that is, as an adjective. It is only signified in the position of a nominal head. This proves that the nominalized function of hypuriná masks the successive determinations of the memory traces in its literal production in the sequence.

The surfaces of [e] 7 to [e] 12 , below, exemplify the unique operation of this item as nominal head; reformulations in which the memory of ‘nation’, ‘tribe’, ‘wild’, ‘savages, ‘domesticated’, ‘errant’, etc., is maintained.

These traces of memory which guarantee the readability of hypuriná in the phrases highlighted above are not taken as mere implicit ones. They date back to operations performed before the material realization of the term in the syntactic position of the head of the NP in Chandless (1866). Which can be explained by the metonymic relation of hypuriná with the meanings of generic categories such as ‘Indians’, ‘indigenous’, ‘tribe’ and ‘nation’. The meaning of this word is thus constituted by a substitution mechanism oriented as a semantic equivalent of ‘tribe/people’ or ‘individual’ in the actuality of formulations in position of nominal head in this author.

It can therefore be said that such naming in Chandless is an abbreviation, since its interpretation is sustained by the resumption of the memory of ‘indigenous, ‘Indians’, ‘tribe’ or ‘nation’ and not its opposite. As to ipuriná being an abbreviated form with an ethnic sense in Chandless, we adopt Sériot’s (1986) position on the memory of a noun or of a resumed NP in a given text. For this analyst, “nouns (NPs in general) function as abbreviations” (SÉRIOT, 1986, p.30)²⁹ resulting from predicative relations produced prior to the current act of enunciation. That is, they are results of the discursive construction of the referent of the word through the space of reformulation-paraphrase where its meaning stabilizes. This construction can be recovered, also, by the function of adjectives in previous texts that specify ethnicities, that is to say, nouns without referential meaning in the phrase. A linguistic reality that is read, for example, in “on one side of this river [...] live the Quaruná Indians” (MATOS, 1845, p.171 - my emphasis);³⁰ in “the Mura Indians deserted” (COUTINHO, 1863, p.316 - my emphasis);³¹ in “the Uaipuiçá tribe is not well known” (COUTINHO, 1863, p.300 - my emphasis);³² or in “The Mundurucu Nation [...] prefers to live in the heart of the woods” (MATOS, 1845, p.173 - my emphasis).³³

It is through this movement of nominalization of the AdjP in the N’ of the NP that one can understand, for example, the resumption of Hypuriná and Jamamadýs, in Chandless (1866, p.95), as transparent nouns used to interpret Purus societies as in the following section:

Apart from all other distinctions, Indians in these regions may be divided into Indians of the land and Indians of the water. The Jamamadýs are exclusively a land tribe, living on small streams only, and not using canoes. The Hypurinás are also a land tribe, but less exclusively (CHANDLESS, 1866, p.95 - italics mine).

The acceptance of the ethnic meaning of hypuriná in the act of its production and interpretation is formed through the process of becoming a subject by its preconstructed operation. The production and interpretation of the [e]s in Chandless (1866) in which hypuriná appears exclusively as N’ of NP occurs in relation to a body of discursive traces that constitutes its space of memory that we characterize from previous texts. It was necessary for this cartographer to be immersed in the network of preexisting signification to construct in his text the coherence of the description of this society, a process of becoming a subject due to the relation between the intradiscourse of older texts and that of his narrative which conceals/subsumes the meaning of ‘errant’, ‘wild,’ ‘tribe,’ etc., in all the formulations where hypurina occurs.

The word hypurina in Chandless’s account repeats the ‘ethnic’ meaning found in earlier texts. In the [e]s of this account, although the idea of ​​language is taken to identify the indigenous societies of the Purus, the word hypurina does not qualify or subsume in the transparency of its signifier such linguistic idea. However, even there being an instrumentation of lexical units with an ethnographic purpose, this report provides a perception of linguistic unity linked to a territoriality represented in its cartographic record that testifies the location of the Hypurinás.

2.3 Meanings of the Word Ipuriná in the Intradiscourse of Polak’s Grammar (1894)

Jacob Resyek Polak was an Anglican missionary who served among the Apurinã in the Purus for eight years. Eleven years after the closing of the Anglican mission³⁴ on this river, he published his grammar and vocabulary of Ipuriná in England. It is the first known grammatical description of the Apurinã. Summarily, it features an orthography based on Latin characters, a description of word classes following Latin grammar, four lists of words and sentences in Apurinã and General Language.

When we observe in its grammar the lexical-syntactic embedding of ipuriná in relation to the head of several VPs, the meaning of the verb and its arguments indicate clues in the production of its interpretation. More specifically, the transitive verb ‘says’ and the verbal phrases ‘have peeped out’, ‘are susceptible’ and ‘is printed’, indicate relations of meanings in the interpretation of the noun:

Nevertheless, in the same nominal head position read in the travelers’ texts, this noun glides into a new reading in Polak (1984): The Ipuriná is printed in italics. That is, a new possibility of connection between discursive objects arises, besides the syntagmatic articulations that express behavioral aspects of the Apurinã subject. However, in order to make explicit the masking of the material character of the production of the ethnonym and the name of language in the position of grammatical subject, it is necessary to go beyond the relation maintained by the term with the meanings of the verbs and the arguments of the verbs.

Overall, the reconstitution of the memory traces that endow the readability of ipuriná in the [e]s in Polak permeates through the syntactic movement between its functioning as NP and AdjP head. This points to the discursive construction of the referent of the name ipuriná through predicative relations prior and external to this grammar. In it, we read occurrences in which such word qualifies nouns that design generic categories into two semantic axes in an interdependent way: ethnographic categories such as ‘Indians’ and ‘tribe’, as one can read in [e] 13 and [e] 14 ; and metalinguistic categories such as ‘grammar’, ‘verb’ and ‘language’, as can be seen in [e] 15 , [e] 16 and [e] 17 :

Therefore, in addition to the evidence of the ethnic sense of ipuriná, the productivity of its metalinguistic sense is “inaugurated” in the intradiscourse of this grammar. A new manifest meaning that is articulated to the memory of the European grammatical tradition. The stability of its meaning as equivalent of ‘language’ in this grammar is also articulated in relation to the first meaning of the term as the equivalent of ‘people’. A displacement of meaning marked by the homonymy that allows us to understand how the definition and reproduction of the discursive object ‘Ipuriná language’ has been historically processed from interdiscursive traces.

Regarding the two possible readings - ‘a specific tribe name’ and ‘a specific name for the language of this tribe’ - for the name ipuriná as a nominal head in subject position in Polak (1894), the formulations have the following configurations: on the one hand, its use in the position of N’ of the NP as the semantic equivalent of’ ‘indigenous people’ or ‘indigenous individual’; on the other hand, its use in the same position as N’ of the NP as the semantic equivalent of’ ‘language’ or ‘grammar’. To illustrate this, note that [e] 18 has the same meaning as the ethnonym of the previous texts, whereas [e] 19 has a metalinguistic meaning:

Although the enunciation of ipuriná in these two formulations is in the same syntactic structure [NP [N’]], its reading is distinct in function of the relation of meaning between the phrases of the sentences, as well as by the paradigmatic relation with the available lexical “stock” as traces of memory.

From the paradigmatic point of view, we find no trace for the interpretation of [e] 19 related to the texts of the travelers’ as its specific exterior. That is, the enunciation of ipuriná in Polak as the N’ of NP meaning ‘language’ is materialized in relation to the prior discursive construction of the referents of ‘people’ or ‘tribe’. A dislocation in the production and interpretation of the term from interdiscursive relations that opens space for its use by homonymy in the metalinguistic domain. This fact is explicable by the reconstitution of memory in the functioning of the two formulations above in which the dissimulation of prior discursive elements occurs for ipuriná to mean in the literalness of its signifier ‘people’ in [e] 18 , and ‘language’ in [e] 19 . Two effects of preconstructed - in the abbreviated form of the NP - that are supported by dissymmetric determinations throughout the discursive process of substitutions that function between linguistic elements.

Thus, the two possibilities of meaning - ‘language’ and ‘people’ -, attested under the same signifier in this author, result from operations of assertion made in previous statements. Faced with the recomposition of the relation of substitution between constituents for the same syntagmatic structure, we observe that this noun appears as head of the NP in a relation of implication of meanings that characterize its preconstructed character in Polak’s enunciations. This stability of the meanings of ipuriná in Polak (1894) can be explained by the recognition of the relations of equivalence and implication by comparing the [e]s extracted from the analyzed discourses. This overlapping of substitutables led to the structuring of two paraphrastic blocks³⁵ that exemplify the appearance of the noun on the syntactic surface as a discursive object in the position of the grammatical subject by the discrepancy of the interdiscourse in the intradiscourse under the preconstructed modality:

Figure 1

When we observe the relations of synonymy and metonymy in these blocks, we understand that the production of the ethnic and linguistic meanings covers a series of discursive elements (Indian, people, nation, tribe, language, slang, etc.) so that ipuriná clearly signifies as the N’ of the NP on the discursive surfaces - a discursive determination under the relative autonomy of the syntax whose marks appear in the derivative alterity from adjective to noun over time. In this way, we linguistically and discursively verify that ipuriná “is not the first invariant, but the stabilization point of the process” (PÊCHEUX; FUCHS, 2014, p.236).³⁶

2.4 Meanings of the Word Apurinã in the Intradiscourse of the Grammar of Facundes (2000)

The thesis ‘The Language of the Apurinã People of Brazil (Maipure/Arawak)’ is the first work of grammatical description of Apurinã made by a Brazilian researcher³⁷. This work is, therefore, an important mark in the constitution of the Brazilian space of linguistic production on Apurinã. It can be taken as the fundamental gear of the production of the linguistic knowledge on Apurinã in the Brazilian academic context. Explicitly affiliated to it, a series of other scientific works that insert Brazilian linguistics in the grammar of Apurinã can be found.

In view of the conditions of meaning production at the threshold of the 21st century, the readable meanings of ‘language’ and ‘people’ for apurinã according to Facundes (2000) are already naturalized - a structure-functioning of the interpellation observable by the intradiscursive embedding of this word into distinct syntactic articulations of this grammar-thesis. Thus, the linguistic base explains the process of becoming-subject by the meanings of apurinã. Questioned by these obvious meanings, this author is led to say in a way that what he says should make sense in his area of ​​knowledge.

The lexical-syntactic embedding of apurinã in Facundes’s [e] (2000), presents the same grammatical functioning when designating the name of the people and their language, as analyzed in Polak’s grammar (1894). In the formulations of that linguist, the word apurinã appears as an adjective, qualifying nouns that signify ethnic or linguistic elements, as well as in the position of head of a nominal phrase denominating metonymically ‘language’ or ‘people’. In these terms, the meanings of apurinã can be described by observing the representations of the implication processes in the paraphrastic blocks (a) and (b) in section 2.3, above.

In the verified syntactic functions, the meanings of this word are given syntagmatically in relation to the two other orders of meanings (characterizable as linguistic and ethnographic). They are retrievable as lexical features that give apurinã its readability. That is, the evidence of this noun both as N’ of NP or as AdjP occurs from the relations of substitutability that articulate their syntagmatization in the grammar of Facundes (2000).

Thus, the horizontal syntagmatization in the [e]s of this author, puts apurinã, on the one hand, in relation to the meanings of ‘communities’, ‘indigenous’, ‘people’, ‘speakers’, ‘society’, etc., and, on the other hand, in relation to the meanings of ‘language’, ‘grammar’, ‘songs’, ‘polysynthetic’, ‘syntax’, etc. In contrast, the discursive production of the meanings of apurinã calls into question the production of its ethnic sense, since the lexical traces that underlie its embedding as memory point to the savage/civilized opposition that determined the perception of otherness in the nineteenth century - a reality that is interpreted in the first reports from terms and expressions like ‘tribe ill-famed’, ‘race’, ‘domesticated’, ‘wild’, ‘savages’, ‘civilized people’ etc.

The reading of the [e]s in relation to the paradigmatic verticality of the interdiscourse and the horizontal syntagmatization of the intradiscourse corroborates the material production of the meanings of apurinã in this thesis. Its meanings are given by the relation maintained with the traces of memory of its specific exterior in the two orders of meanings pointed out. In other words, the meanings of this term become evidence of the real through the discursive production of its referents from a network of substitutability of words and external expressions for the embedding of the term in the Facundes’s grammar.

As we have previously pointed out, the term ipuriná (hypuriná or apurinã) used as equivalent of language is not a first invariant, but the point of stabilization of a discursive process. Such naming in Facundes’s grammar is constituted in relation to traces of memory recoverable since the first reformulations of the nineteenth century. Traces that are concealed in the actuality of enunciations of this grammar so that apurinã could be embedded as a preconstructed in the discursive surfaces below:

Apurinã, readable as ‘language’ in positions like N’ of NP or N’ of AdjP in Facundes (2000), resumes the memory of the beginning of its grammatization. In Chandless (1866), although the first document to contain a metalinguistic discourse on the Apurinã, the word ipuriná is still not interpreted as ‘language’ in the order of its lexical-syntactic embedding. It is in Polak (1894) that a whole discursivity based on the Greco-Latin grammatical tradition offers conditions to the metonymic process that sustains the sense of ipuriná as equivalent of language.

At any rate, the interdiscursive characterization of the memory traces of apurinã allows us to affirm, historically-discursively and lexically-syntactically, that in the network of the analyzed [e] such word, as the name of the ‘people’, has a pre-constructed functioning in relation to its readability as the equivalent of ‘language’. This demonstrates that for any [e] where the term means ‘language’, the sense of ‘people’ is necessarily a hidden trace of memory under the transparency of the homonymous signifier. That is, the meaning of ‘language’ in expressions such as ‘Apurinã is spoken’, ‘Children are still learning Apurinã’, etc., works by discrepancy in relation to the meaning of ‘people’ in statements such as ‘The Apurinãs lost their culture’ ‘The Apurinãs stopped’ etc., throughout the grammar. The paraphrastic block (c), below, summarizes this gliding. In it, X is taken as place of substitutability of lexical features like ‘nation’, ‘tribe’, ‘maloca’, ‘community’, ‘society’:

Figure 2

In this grammar, the metalinguistic meaning of Apurinã results from an exteriority traceable from the evidence at the lexical-syntactic level of Polak’s nineteenth century grammar. That is, the term Apurinã in Facundes (2000), as the name of an indigenous language, functions as an abbreviation derived from the metonymic process that we characterize in paraphrastic block (b), section 2.3.

Faced with the confrontation of the formulations, the interdiscursive traces from which the name of the language and the society of the Pupỹkarywakury is established in the languages of the “whites” in the first three analyzed texts do not appear as elements of rewriting in Facundes’ enunciations (2000). Enunciatively, this author adopts a position unrelated to the meanings of the first lexical features through which the meanings of ipuriná (or hypuriná) materialize, an apparent contradiction structured by a heterogeneity marked on the surface of the most recent grammatical descriptions. In evoking the word tribe, for example, this author circumscribes it in the mode of direct citation, marking the discrepancy between his voice and the voices of the travelers, settlers and missionaries of the nineteenth century.

Labre would eventually have the aid of Apurinãs during his journey on the Ituxi river. Moreover, that permanent contact between some Apurinãs and “Whites” had already started is attested by the fact that “[i]n 1879, three youths of the [Hypuriná] tribe were entrusted to him [Colonel Labre] for education” (LABRE, 1889 apud FACUNDES, 2000, p.31; my emphasis).

Even read under a new order of lexical elements in the rewriting of this grammar that point to the dignification of the people and their language, the meanings of ‘Apurinã society’ and ‘Apurinã language’ are not reproduced in Facundes (2000) unrelated to the memory that sustains their existence in reformulations of the nineteenth-century. By this, we mean that the readability of the word Apurinã’ in the 21st century is inescapably under the dependence of the “‘complex whole in dominance’ of discursive formations” (PÊCHEUX, 1982, p.113),³⁸ from which the first meanings from the Pupỹkarywakury derive in the documents of travelers and settlers. Meanings that even though no longer textualized as lexical elements in the order of a horizontal syntagmatization remain as memory. That is, as their specific exterior, “speaking” while elsewhere discursive.

Theoretical Consequences

Our study summarizes the material production of the meanings of the word apurinã, as we analyzed how discursive determinations, which circle as non-sayings the sequencing of apurinã, historically produce their meanings in relation to the meanings of other words and expressions. This means that “the meaning of a word [...] does not exist ‘in itself’” (PÊCHEUX, 1982, p.111),³⁹ but by the relation that such word maintains with its specific exterior, its interdiscourse.

The notion of preconstructed was crucial in this endeavor to make explicit the concatenation of naming in an enunciation/formulation as effect by discrepancy in relation to the memory ballast that constitutes its interdiscourse. Thus, from the questions proposed in the introduction, we highlight two consequences regarding the historical issues surrounding the constitution of the name of the Apurinã language and, by extension, the name of the languages of the world.

The first consequence concerns the historical production of the name of an indigenous language from an ethnonym assumed by the colonizer. A work of memory on the invariant basis of some European languages through a process of oriented substitution that stabilizes the meanings of apurinã. “Being apurinã” is read as “being indigenous”, but being “indigenous” does not correspond, pari passu, to “being apurinã”. The discursive construction of the referent passes through a relation of implication. Ipuriná/hypurina/apurinã is not a first invariant, but the result of a process of substitutability. A contradictory material objectivity of the interdiscourse concealed in the preconstructed functioning of the name of the Apurinã language as nominalized form, whose index of this exteriority is observed from its occurrence in adjective position.

The second consequence concerns the understanding of the name of a language as a knowledge resulting from the universalization of metalinguistic reflections. In other words, it concerns its use in the field of metalanguage as a semantic equivalent of language. In this direction, we propose that when considering the metonymic process of the nominalization of apurinã, metalinguistic reflection and, consequently, grammatical traditions are essential historical-ideological conditions without which there would be no name for any language in the world as an effect of a linguistic unit. Thus, we want to think about the historical (im)possibility of societies that have no relation whatsoever with writing to create a linguistic reflection capable of producing the homogenizing notion of language as a speculative reality whose event would require a name.

• Translated by Antonio Codina Bobia - [e-mail]
• 1
  PÊCHEUX, M. Language, Semantics and Ideology. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
• 2
  For reference, see ^{footnote 1}.
• 3
  Courtine (2009, p.101) defines the notion of formulation as a “linguistic sequence (of a syntagmatic dimension less than or equal to a sentence) which is a possible reformulation of [E]”. In Portuguese: “sequência linguística (de dimensão sintagmática inferior, ou igual a uma frase) que é uma reformulação possível de [E]”. An enunciation, in turn, is “a form or a general scheme that governs repeatability within a network of formulations” (COURTINE, 2009, p. 100). In Portuguese: “uma forma ou um esquema geral que governa a repetibilidade no seio de uma rede de formulações”. Thus, the operationalization of the notion of enunciation should not be confused with that of formulation, although they are complementary.
• 4
  For reference, see ^{footnote 1}.
• 5
  “Discursive modalities of the presence of the other in the literal identity of the sequence” (PÊCHEUX, 2015, p.150). In Portuguese: “Modalidades discursivas da presença do outro na identidade literal da sequência”. The notion of preconstructed theoretically represents the ‘already-said’ that emerges in the sequence disagreeing with other series of elements of its interdiscursive space, which remain as ‘non-sayings’ from the sequence, that is, as properties underlying its literalness.
• 6
  The reference by the indigenous of this society to their language in their own language is materialized by the expression “Pupỹkary sãkyri” (FERREIRA, 2014, p.03) which corresponds in English to the expression ‘Apurinã language’. The discursive construction of the referent of that expression by the indigenous Apurinã is recent. According to Link (2016, p.57), this is due to the emergence of a “policy of reaffirming ethnic [and identity] borders” from the 1970s. In Portuguese: “política de reafirmação de fronteiras étnicas [e identitárias]”.
• 7
  In 1945, he acted as military representative of the Upper Amazon Region, subordinate to the Province of Pará.
• 8
  MILNER, J-C. For the Love of Language. New York, NY: The Palgrave Macmillan Press., 1990.
• 9
  Traditional type of indigenous longhouse.
• 10
  From the grammatical point of view, the function of adjective of the word is defined by its relation to the head of the noun phrase. A positional relation that is not formally defined, but by semantic criteria. According to Perini et al. (2017, emphasis added), “the nucleus is the term of the NP that is taken in a referential sense – that is, as ‘designation of a thing’”. In Portuguese: “o núcleo é o termo do SN que está tomado em acepção referencial — ou seja, como ‘designação de uma coisa’”. Grammatically, in this case, ipuriná would signify in relation to the meanings of the heads, which point to the extralinguistic area, considering therein the discursive production of the referent through the processes of substitutability between elements that characterize the memory space of a word, expression or proposition.
• 11
  In Portuguese: “indígenas [...] já domesticados.”
• 12
  In Portuguese: “indígenas [...] ainda bravios.”
• 13
  For reference, see ^{footnote 1}.
• 14
  For reference, see ^{footnote 1}.
• 15
  A notion used by Authier-Revuz (1982) to refer to the discrete presence of the interdiscourse in the processes of textual production without explicit marking of the sources of enunciation.
• 16
  In Portuguese: “domínio de saber [que lhe é] próprio.”
• 17
  In Portuguese: “zona do rejeitado.”
• 18
  In French : “les noms (les SN en général) fonctionnent ainsi comme des abréviations.”
• 19
  In Portuguese: “em um lado desse rio [...] vivem os indígenas Quaruná.”
• 20
  In Portuguese: “os índios Muras desertaram.”
• 21
  In Portuguese: “não é bem conhecida a tribo Uaipuiçá”
• 22
  In Portuguese: “A Nação Mundurucu [...] gosta mais de habitar o coração das brenhas.”
• 23
  The Anglican Church maintained its mission on the Purus River from 1872 to 1883 (LINK, 2016).
• 24
  ‘I love thee very much’, according to Polak (1894).
• 25
  The NP2 “called Ipuriná” is classified as nominal, since the verb is in one of the nominal forms; however, this phrase carries an adjectival feature.
• 26
  For the schematization of the blocks, we followed Pêcheux (2015, p.259): “vertical bars grouping two elements indicate the identification of [...] synonymous expressions; the arrows grouping the elements means the relation of implication between them, so that one implies the other and not vice versa”. In Portuguese: “as barras verticais agrupando dois elementos indicam a identificação de expressões [...] sinônimas; as flechas agrupando os elementos significa a relação de implicação entre eles, de forma que um implica o outro e não vice-versa.”
• 27
  In Portuguese: “não é a invariante primeira, mas o ponto de estabilização do processo.”
• 28
  Sidney da Silva Facundes was born in the Brazilian state of Amapá. In 2000, he defended his thesis in Linguistics at the State University of New York At Buffalo. Currently, he works as an assistant professor at the Instituto de Letras of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA).
• 29
  For reference, see ^{footnote 1}.
• 30
  For reference, see ^{footnote 1}.

REFERÊNCIAS

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• COURTINE, J-J. Análise do discurso político: o discurso comunista endereçado aos cristãos. Tradução Patrícia Chittoni Ramos Reuillard et al. São Carlos, SP: EdUFScar, 2009.
• COUTINHO, J. Considerações gerais sobre os rios que descem da cordilheira dos Andes nas proximidades de Cuzco, Cochoeiras do Purus e Juruá. 1º de março de 1863. In: O tratado de limites Brasil-Peru: Documentos para a História do Acre. Brasília: Senado Federal, 2009 [1863]. p.253-299.
• FACUNDES, S. The Language of the Apurinã people of Brazil (Maipure/Arawak). Buffalo, 2000, 674 f. Tese (PhD em Linguística) - Faculty of the Graduate School, State University of New York, Buffalo, 2000. Disponível em: http://www. etnolinguistica.org/local--files/tese:facundes-2000/Facundes.pdf Acesso em: 25/01/2019.
  » http://www. etnolinguistica.org/local--files/tese:facundes-2000/Facundes.pdf
• FERREIRA, A. Alfabetizando em Pupỹkary Sãkyri. São Leopoldo, PR: Oikos, 2014.
• LABRE, A. Rio Purus: Notícias. Maranhão: Tipografia do Paiz Imp. M. F. V. Pires, 1872.
• LINK, R. Vivendo entre mundos: o povo Apurinã e a última fronteira do Estado brasileiro nos séculos XIX e XX. Porto Alegre, 2016. 357 f. Tese (Doutorado em História) - Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, 2016. Disponível em: https://lume.ufrgs.br/ bitstream/handle/10183/142913/000994268.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Acesso em: 25/01/2019.
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• MATOS, J. Relatório do estado de decadência em que se acha o Alto Amazonas. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, v. 325, p.143-180, 1979 [1845].
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• PÊCHEUX, M; FUCHS, C. A propósito da análise automática do discurso: atualização de perspectivas (1975). Tradução Péricles Cunha. In: GADET, F; HAK, T. (org.). Por uma análise automática do discurso: uma introdução à obra de Michel Pêcheux. 5. ed. Campinas, SP: Editora da Unicamp, 2014. p.159-249.
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• PICKERING, W. Apurinã Grammar: Preliminary Version. Arquivo Linguístico Nr. 008. Brasília, D.F., S.I.L, 1971.
• POLAK, J. E. R. A Grammar and a Vocabulary of the Ipuriná Language. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1894.
• SÉRIOT, P. Langue Russe et discour politique soviétique: analysis des nominalisations. Languages, n. 81, p.11-41, 1986.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 Apr 2020
• Date of issue
  Apr-Jun 2020

History

• Received
  25 Feb 2019
• Accepted
  26 Oct 2019