Inserção do profano no sagrado – a adoração do menino num corpus de peças de Cante

Abstract

This article examines a corpus of variants of sacred “cante”, by essentially resorting to semantic analysis. Na analysis of the noun references to the Holy Infant, in a world of beliefs assumed as Christian, contrasts instances of the divinity as a complex abstract object. By these reference processes the sacred entity and man are drawn closer. The former is, thus, hidden under more familiar entities, which occur, both at the sentence level and at the discourse level, in several elements – though they may have here a scarce treatment – such as: some verbs; lexical, morphological and phonological peculiarities; and other instances in the fields of sociolinguistics, and text analysis. All these converge to the appropriation of the sacred entity by man, as this article aims to demonstrate.