Resumo:
Studies related to the history of language, with regard to the processes of linguistic change, are
evidently based on records of texts produced in the past by a specific ideologically constituted
subject in a community. Thus, history, in addition to showing the evolution of human beings
and their adaptations to technologies, also shows the changes imposed on the conceptions about
the world in which the human lives and the changes that their language undergoes over time.
Therefore, many texts written in the past are recovered by philology, through textual criticism
and historical linguistics, in order to preserve a material that will serve as documentary and
literary testimony, in addition to enabling the observation of the states of certain languages in
different past times (or different synchronies) and the evolution of certain linguistic phenomena,
associated with historical and sociocultural factors, in an attempt to interpret the changes that
have occurred in the past and the variations existing in a contemporary moment. It is in search
of this history that we propose here to analyze the Portuguese toponyms found in the text
História de Portugal, written by the humanist Fernão de Oliveira, probably around 1581, and
how this author uses the rhetorical discourse from the onomastic lexicon. To do so, we seek
support in specific theoretical guidelines: theory of enunciation, under the approach of
Benveniste (2005; 2006), Bakhtin (2003) and Bakhtin [Voloshinov] (2004 [1929]), which place
the subject at the center of linguistics reflections; to understand the process of historiographical
writing, having as a parameter the rules of classical rhetoric, along the lines of the methodology
of Aristotle (2005 [IV century BC]), passing through the rhetoric used in the Middle Ages to
the new rhetoric or the treatise on argumentation, by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2005)
and Perelman (2004); for the toponymic analysis method, the research is based on Dick's
taxonomic model (1990; 1992; 1998; 2007). The data collection and analysis seek to confirm
or refute the following hypotheses: i. The interpretation of toponyms would be the author's
intention to mark Portugal in the field of immunity and primacy over other nations, in order to
convince the people, his main interlocutor, to fight for a kingdom superior to other nations; ii.
The characteristics of the historiographical discourse genre influenced Fernão de Oliveira in
the construction of his narrative, based on his commitment to the “truth”, always in discussion
since Greek Antiquity, specifically with Herodotus and Thucydides; iii. The incorporation of
the biblical world in his text, with the author being a humanist subject, more focused on
human’s issues, would be an influence of his ecclesiastical background or would it be the
dualistic mentality of man in that transition period, imagined by humanism, whose behavior
brought the ambivalence of the theocentric view of the Middle Ages and the anthropocentrism
characteristic of the Renaissance. The result shows that Fernão de Oliveira sought to organize
his ideas in order to prove Portugal’s superiority over Spain. To do so, the dominican built his
discursive ethos related to the moment of enunciation in order to lead the interlocutor through
a narrative that is not necessarily real, but credible.