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The current paper focuses on the representation of Galician language in Portuguese metalinguistic speech from the 16th to the 19th century. Hence, this essay will work upon a corpus of selected texts from the Portuguese metalinguistic tradition of this period, embracing different textual typologies. Such corpus will be the basis to the survey of explicit references to Galician language, whose interpretation will be attempted here, especially concerning what they convey on reciprocal knowledge and the status of Galician in relation to Portuguese in the broader frame of the Iberian setting. This approach shall be undertaken observing the methodological guidelines of Linguistic Historiography and having as a fundamental reference Vázquez Corredoira (1998) monograph, but also the papers of Monteagudo (1988) and Duarte (2007), on the metagrammaticographical speech on Galician language during the outlined chronological framework.

With this study, we aim to continue the study of the reformulative markers in European contemporary Portuguese (Lopes 2014). Two new discourse markers, por outras palavras and digamos, are syntactically, semantically and pragmatically described in this paper. The empirical data were colected from CETEMPúblico and the oral subcorpus of CRPC. Even though both discourse markers can be included in the paradigm of the reformulative ones, the study proves that digamos is not a prototypical member, given its productivity as a filler and a mitigation operator.

The first section of the paper contains a brief introduction to discourse markers, beginning with a definition of the term, and it offers a short summary of the current state of research in relation to discourse markers in Galician, and touches on the problem of interference from Spanish; it also identifies the different types of discourse marker. The remaining sections focus on the five categories of discourse marker outlined in the introduction (organisational markers, connectives, reformulation markers, discourse operators and interactional markers together with the main functions and characteristics of each, using examples from a corpus of written and oral texts.

This paper examines the anthroponyms of the first modern Galician novel, Marcial Valladares’ Majina, ou a filla espúrea (1870), a text classified in the genre known as ‘folletín’. The purpose is to study the names of the novel’s characters as regards to the dualist conception that articulates its plot. After a brief overview to recent, and still scarce, studies in literary Galician anthroponymy is provided, the analysis is focused on showing there was no arbitrariness on the author’s side when choosing his character’s names. Supposed flamboyance in some of them corresponds to a social indentity mark: anthroponyms with classist implications for aristocrats, and names of Christian origin for farmers and craftspeople. Along with this, an insistance is made on the fact that, following a long literary tradition, some of the proper names may be understood to have a meaning motivated by the characters’s behaviour.

This paper investigated the Brazilian Portuguese final unstressed mid-vowels heightening based on the principles and methodologies of the Sociohistorical Linguistics (Romaine 2009) and according to the principles of the Uniformitarian Principle (Whitney 1867 / Labov 1994 / Labov 2008 / Joseph / Janda 2003). To the development of the analysis, it was used two kinds of empirical data: direct evidence (metalinguistic and didactic books) and indirect evidence (letters from Coleção Varela). The results of the analysis demonstrated that the heightening of the final unstressed vowels /e/ and /o/ occurred in Brazilian Portuguese in the 19th century.