Body as context-of-occurrence of metapragmatics about Portuguese in socializations of migrant students to brazil

Abstract

This paper analyzes metapragmatic projections about Portuguese in migrant students’ narratives in Brazil. Yielded in longitudinal ethnographic research, the narratives focused on the migratory trajectories of coming, reception and permanence and their positions in front of the Portuguese. For this analysis, Povinelli’s interpretations of metapragmatics and Ochs’s studies on language socialization are central. The analysis points out that the socialization of institutional norms as fundamental in the explicit formulations on the value of Portuguese used by the narrator and the evaluation of the student experience. These metapragmatics guide the interpretation of the linguistic values of what is said, to whom, why and in what circumstances, while the speaking body projects itself and projects its interlocutors in this interpretation. The body is a context-of-occurrence for semiotic resources - the space where conditions are constituted to say certain things and the space that is constituted by the things that are said.

Keywords:
Student migration; Body; Socialization; Metapragmatics; Portuguese