Las paremias en el discurso de Machado de Assis

Resumen

The main aim of our doctorate thesis Refrains in the discourse of Machado de Assis is centered on the field of paremiology. The chosen corpus for development of this thesis are seven books of short stories by Brazilian writer Joaquim Machado de Assis, born in 1839, in Rio de Janeiro. The lack of scientific analysis of this author’s works from the perspective of paremiology motivated our choice of subject matter. The main objective of our investigation consists in determining the types of refrains used and themes evoked by these refrains in Machado de Assis’s short stories. To this aim, we will: - Determine the types of refrain most frequently employed by the writer, both generally throughout his books and specifically during literary epochs in which he participated, such as the Romanticism and the Realism periods; - Determine how refrains are introduced into the texts; - Determine the principal themes evoked in the author’s tales; - Determine whether the author centers on a specific theme or if multiple interpretations are possible; - Demonstrate whether there was a thematic evolution in the author’s work between the two literary periods of the author. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first offers a general vision of the epoch in which the author lived. The Brazil of the 19th century lived under the shadow of civil unrest among its different social echelons, triggered by political upheaval caused by as the independence of Brazil, the end of the monarchy, the rise of the Republic, the end of slavery and the beginning of immigration. We also provide a brief outline of the life of Machado de Assis and his bibliography. We provide the background to his work: the situation of reading public of the time; their economic and educational poverty. The second part addresses the theoretical bases of phraseology and paremiology on which we have drawn for the terms of reference used to denominate the components of phraseology. We also introduce the different types of refrain which are the subject of our study. We define the issues, broaden the information on the methodology applied and provide an interpretation. The last part of our study consists of three chapters that present the typological, thematic and discursive function analyses...