Published in 1725, the second edition of Jerônimo Contador de Argote´s "Regras da lingua portuguesa: espelho da língua latina" [Rules of the Portuguese language: mirror of Latin] contains a chapter dealing specifically and thoroughly with languistic variation. Argote´s grammar is indeed important for he examines both regional and social dialects of Portuguese thereby enabling researchers to ascertain the state of the art of language studies as well as the prevailing norm of the language in Portugal in the 18th century. Truly a masterpiece of the Enlightenment, the goal of the author was to describe the structure of Portuguese and compare it with Latin. Syntactic rules that diverged from those in Latin were to be ignored. Argote (1725) recommended that instructors of Portuguese in schools refrained from teaching syntactic structures deviant from the Latin norm and contended also that such practice would be unsound. The data of this grammar text is based on the author´s observation of the language in everyday practice and, therefore, no literary examples are provided. Our aim in this study, based on the principles and methods of linguistic historiography, is to illustrate (i) how the aspects of linguistic variation were accounted for, (ii) how they were recorded in the text, and (iii) what they reveal about the attempt to identify and establish a norm for the Portuguese language at that moment in history.
Linguistic usage; Linguistic norm; Linguistic variation; Grammar book
