Construções -se em anúncios publicitários de revistas paulistanas

Abstract

This research investigates constructions with the pronoun se in advertisements published in magazines from 1890 to 1920. At the turn of the 20 th century, many changes took place in the city of São Paulo, in advertising and in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Studies have shown that, from that moment on, instead of producing the socalled passive-se, BP has been using the active construction with se, in which the verb does not agree with the internal argument. In the present analysis, the linguistic phenomenon is not taken as an isolated part of the advertisements, but is observed in relation to the other verbal and non-verbal elements of the text and also the social, historical and cultural context. Reading the advertisements as a whole showed that the verb agreed with a topic, co-indexed with a null subject, which referred to a typographically salient element in the page. Through this type of examination, we could identify both active and passive structures; at the same time, the pronoun se denoted that the semantic agent was human and indefinite. The different kinds of constructions with se also revealed that a social structural feature of São Paulo, viz. the alternation between hierarchical and impersonal relationships, could reach the linguistic domain.