When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) - who had recently come from Brazil where he stayed from 1935 until 1939 - met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, among which the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904-1970) was much more consequential, at least in what concerns the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America during the 1950s and the 1960s. The impact of Jakobson and of American Linguistics on the work of Mattoso Câmara and its subsequent influence on developments of Brazilian linguistics are the focus of the article.
Linguistic Circle of New York; Jakobson; Structuralism
