Ethnocultural Code of the Brazilian Novel (1902–1922s): On Revealing and Discription

Abstract

The focal points of the study are the issues concerning Brazilian ethnoculture scrutiny and the means of its verbalisation in fictional texts. The study is devoted to the problems of ethnocultural code identification and description. It is carried out within multidisciplinary approach and with special software application in order to verify the preliminary outcomes. The criteria for cultural and ethnocultural codes differentiation are suggested, the author's methodology of philological research into ethnocultural codes and complex verification of the results obtained is tested. The data was obtained from the corpora of precedent Brazilian novels, published in the first quarter of the 20 th century (1902–1922s). This period of Brazilian literature is called Pre-Modernism, it has insufficiently been studied by Russian researchers as of yet. The results of social-and-humanitarian expertise and linguistic analysis as well as quantitative characteristics have enabled the author to reveal and describe ethnocultural code, which is contained in Brazilian fictional texts of the first quarter of the 20 th century. This code is shown as a structure, which is comprised of the ethnocultural codes of sertões, Bahia, race, space, and religion. The thematic groups of lexical units that verbalize each of the above-mentioned codes are characterized, the peculiarities of their functioning in the texts are identified.