Language policies and lexicographical discourse: adequacy-conversion-regeneration

Abstract

In this article, joining the History of Linguistic Ideas and Pechetian Discourse Analysis, we aim to understand how the work with the lexicon, articulating lexicology, lexicography, and semantics, operates in education and language public policies from the second half of the century XX, as a way of managing the meanings and the subject in a neoliberal discursive formation. The discursive management of language by the lexicon means the normalization of meanings, therefore, of the subject, in the search for a semantically normal – adequate – world, in which imaginatively stable boundaries and limits can be established. In these demarcations and divisions, we have the confrontation of the symbolic with the political. We take as material for description-analysis, a series formed by the words adequacy, adequate (verb), adequate (adj) for the centrality they have had since the 1960s/1970s, in language policies, in school practices, and in life in society, dialoguing with the series: conversion, convert, converted, and regeneration, regenerate, regenerated, so that we could observe the movement of discursive formations, in which a (discursive) memory recovers, through repetition and displacement, meanings that ensure the space of stability and, at the same time, that open up to the not logically stabilized.