“To each one what seems best to her/him”: Debate and controversy around the Parametric Sociolinguistics in the History of Brazilian Linguistics

Abstract

This article analyzes a debate in the Brazilian linguistics of the 1980s, when Fernando Tarallo, José Borges Neto and Ana Lúcia de Paula Müller differed on a parametric sociolinguistics. In the perspective of a study of the Historiography of Linguistics and based on a socio-rhetorical framework of analysis, which defines theoretical and methodological guidelines of this proposal, the text presents (i) considerations about what is understood in this interpretation as rhetoric and (ii) a historiographic analysis of the debate. This analytical view considers for its interpretative perspective discursive elements of the discourses adopted in the debate (that is, the rhetoric assumed by the linguists) and also elements of a social nature, that can circumscribe the discourses in specific groups of researchers (theory groups) in language science in Brazil. It is pointed out that the debate in question, several times referenced when it comes to a history of Brazilian linguistics, maintained its polemical nature, evidencing that the rhetoric of linguists, when assumed by the historiographic view, must be understood from of its social and historical inscription.