On the history of semantic studies in Brazil

The term "semantics" has been used with various meanings and purposes since the 19th century, when several grammarians used semantic arguments in support of their theses (Guimarães 2004). During the last 50 years, many research trends in Brazil have defined themselves as "semantic", while arguing for competing theoretical hypotheses and methodological designs. Other research trends have emphatically refused the semantic label or have decided to append qualifiers such as "cognitive," "argumentative," or "formal" to it. Given this background, we adopt a fourstep strategy in this survey. In our first step, we recall the motivational wanderings that led to the earliest Brazilian research groups adopting the name "Semantics". In a second step, we list these groups and try to evaluate their achievements, claiming that they attained uneven stages of development. This picture ignores many works that were not assumed to have been doing semantics but helped to uncover several important semantic features of Brazilian Portuguese (BP); therefore, our next section will be about these authors who did semantics sans le savoir. Finally, we will discuss a possible semantic agenda for BP, exemplifying both with traditional topics and topics that have come to the fore more recently

Argumentative · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Portuguese · Programming language · Semantic similarity · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Linguistics and Education Research · Linguistics and Language Studies · Philosophy

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