PROJECT CARDS
Cartas Desconhecidas, Unknown Letters
FCT/PTDC/LIN/64472/2006
- The physical survival of private manuscripts from the period of 1500-1900 is a largely unknown fact.
People tend to imagine that old private papers, which are fragile documents containing intimate texts,
were normally destroyed either by those who wrote them or by the ones who received or inherited them. Only when the papers belonged to prestiged authors was
there a context that favoured conservation. However, some private papers written by common people were instrumental to the
Crown Justice or the Inquisition Justice, since they were good judicial proof. In those cases, the private documents received a
special archival treatment and we can find them today by the thousands, kept in the middle of other judicial papers.
The project of publishing precisely some of these private papers originally written by common people is the aim of CARDS, within the larger scope of studying
linguistic artifacts produced in the private sphere. A team was constituted with researchers coming from different backgrounds: philology,
linguistics and cultural history. Until the end of 2010, the CARDS project will offer to the public the electronic edition of 2.000
private letters from the XVIth to the XIXth century. The edition will be accompanied of historical and linguistic keywords and monographies on the following topics:
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SYNTAX: the history of Classical and Modern Portuguese with respect to clitic placement and clitic doubling, topic/focus constructions, relative pronouns and relative clauses,
impersonal and passive structures with the clitic pronoun “se”, infinitival and gerund clauses, negation and negative indefinites, subject-verb agreement.
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PHONOLOGY: the history of assimilation/dissimilation processes and the history of the unstressed vowel system in Classical and Modern Portuguese dialects.
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PRAGMATICS: the communicative force of graphic uses.
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CULTURAL HISTORY: templates, normative discourse and letter practices during Modern and Early Contemporary Ages.
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SOCIO-POLITICAL HISTORY: strategies of social mobility and social affirmation, reactions to political change and political facts: the rise and fall of the Philipine dinasty, the Restauration War, Pombalism, the French Invasions, the crisis of the Old regime, the Liberal revolutions and the Civil Wars.
