THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL LANGUAGE IN SAMBA SCHOOL PARADES

THE INFORMATIVITY OF SAMBA-ENREDO

Abstract

Based on Barros (2013) and Trinta (1985), we are inclined to say what they did not necessarily say, that is, that the carnival of the samba school parades is a textual genre, and each parade is a text of it. A syncretic text, or, in other words, a mixed text, because it brings together expressions of verbal and non-verbal language. The lyrics of the samba-enredo are verbal language, as well as, perhaps, other written records in the parade components; all other semioses through which the carnival designer carries out the parade's plot are non-verbal. It is worth knowing that it is up to Textual Linguistics to expand the notion of text, inserting into it the action of other semiotic systems besides the verbal (Barros, 2017; Bentes, Ramos, Filho, 2010). The samba-enredo, despite the “extrinsic” plot to which it refers, has its own plot, that is, the “intrinsic” one (Mussa & Simas, 2010). If its own plot is sufficiently informative, the samba-enredo does not seem to depend on the relationship with other types of language in the parade to communicate minimally. However, is the textuality of the samba-enredo, according to the informativeness factor, in fact sufficient or does it extend to the parade as a whole? This question is the subject of our ongoing doctoral research, whose thesis, in preparation, reserves space for the inauguration of this discussion, for which we count on the contributions of Textual Linguistics, especially through Val (2006), regarding what the author understands as sufficiency of informative data. For demonstration purposes, we will present some justifications for the grade and the lyrics of the samba-enredo, from the year 2023, by the samba school Mocidade Independente de Padre Miguel, from Rio de Janeiro. As a theoretical contribution, we rely on the knowledge of Antunes (2017), Cavalcante et al. (2022) and, as already mentioned, Val (2006), to deal with informativeness as an analysis criterion under the interest of this work. The results found so far are not at all conclusive, namely: they are more problematizing than conclusive.