Minha Terra Tem ____________: Patterns of Text Reuse in “Song of Exile” and its Intertexts

Abstract

A foundational text of Brazilian Romanticism, Antônio Gonçalves Dias’s “Canção do Exílio,” written in Coimbra (1843) and published in Niterói (1846), is uniquely positioned as Brazil’s most imitated poem. Based on a data set of 500 intertexts spanning the years 1846-2015, this study contemplates the nature of textual borrowing found in the poem’s variations. Looking beyond words shared across texts to the syntactic patterns at play, this paper defines and discusses in detail the concept of Syntactic Templates, develops an algorithm for their identification and considers their utility for understanding this specific text reuse problem.