Aquilino Ribeiro and João Guimarães Rosa are among the most important writers in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature of 20th century. They have been often compared each other for their baroque and expressionist prose, and because of the mostly rural and regional setting of their major works, usually classifying them as Literary Regionalism. The present study aims to analyze, through significant examples, the relationships and similarities between these writers, highlighting all the centrifugal forces that (through a Bakhtinian point of view) work in contrast to the standardized literary language.
The literary language of Guimarães Rosa appears to reproduce the popular language of Minas Gerais, however within it we can also find cultism, quotes, archaisms, neologisms, calques, linguistic loans, in a mix that seems completely natural. Drawing upon Nilce Sant’Anna Martins’Léxico de Gumarães Rosa (São Paulo, 2001), I will observe a selection of neologisms devised by Rosa that are formed by hexogen elements from foreign languages (old and modern). Furthermore, I will attempt to demonstrate how this phenomenon could stem from the influence that critical reflections on language deriving from linguistic theory and characterizing the hermeneutical practices of the 20th century (from Modernism to neo-vanguards) had on Guimarães.