College Grammars and Popular Grammars in the Last Quarter of the 19th Century: a Historiographical Aid for Teaching Portuguese

Abstract

In these last decades, scholars have been examining the “fundamental corpus” of grammar publications. As a result, quite a few texts that concentrated on a “minor historiography” of the Portuguese grammar were produced. Using as a springboard a discussion on the “state of the art” on college grammars in the last quarter of the 19th century, in this paper we pay particular attention to two “gramáticas populares” since they are metalinguistic texts with structural, conceptual, terminological, and discursive characteristics that aim at reaching a wider public, thus providing an accessible and actualized knowledge.