Questões sobre o fonema na obra de Émile Benveniste.

Abstract

Discussing the work of Émile Benveniste isn’t an easy task, since the author has, in his works, interlocutions with several areas of knowledge, confirmed by the treatment given to the themes in his works. However, we realize that, although Benveniste understands the language as a whole in the enunciative act, the phoneme theme is diluted in his works and is not commonly addressed in the enunciative Benvenistiana-based scientific research. In this context, in this research we have as general objective to investigate the treatment given to the phoneme in the best known works of Émile Benveniste: Problems of General Linguistics, volumes I and II. This work, we will emphasize the area language acquisition. For this we will present discussions about the phoneme from the findings of Trubetzkoy (1933), Courtenay (1870), Jakobson (1967), to the considerations of Benveniste, who perhaps are not limited only to discussions about the minimal unity of the word or in their phonetic / phonological representation. We assume that the phoneme can be perceived as an enunciative environment. Thus, this research will be guided by the epistemological bases of Enunciation theory, represented by the works of Émile Benveniste and the studies on the phoneme of Baudouin Courtenay, Nicolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, who began their work on structuralism and established their research on Functionalism. We have developed a qualitative study characterized as a bibliographical review in the aforementioned works, in which we seek to traverse the Benveniste studies by reviewing the possible perspectives given to the phoneme in the author's thought and its relation to the enunciation. We performed the analysis from a thorough data collection of the use of the concept of phoneme by Benveniste in the researched works. With this study we find in the works of Benveniste a discussion about the phoneme, which makes it possible to identify it, also, as an enunciative environment, linguistics analyze and sense.