Twenty years of the Project ALIP (Linguistic Sample from São Paulo Countryside) and the legacy of Ataliba de Castilho

Abstract

The Iboruna Database, developed within the scope of the ALIP Project (Amostra Linguística do Interior Paulista / Linguistic Sample from the State of São Paulo Countryside), celebrates its 20th anniversary, highlighting its contributions to the description of Portuguese as spoken in the interior of the state of São Paulo. The trajectory of this project is closely aligned with principles of linguistic research advocated by Ataliba Teixeira de Castilho, particularly the valorization of language in use, the compilation of representative corpora, and the articulation between linguistic description and theoretical reflection. Against this background, this article aims to provide an overview of the scientific production developed from the speech samples in the Iboruna Database over its two decades of existence, highlighting its thematic and theoretical-methodological breadth and its contributions to the description of the linguistic variety spoken in northwestern São Paulo and of Brazilian Portuguese. Based on a bibliographic survey of scientific publications that use the database's speech samples as a corpus, we selected as a reference point findings from studies devoted to phonetic-phonological, morphosyntactic, and textual-discursive phenomena. The survey identified more than one hundred academic works and, after excluding thematic overlaps and recurring research topics, 64 studies representative of the research conducted using the database were selected. The selected studies address different levels of linguistic analysis and demonstrate the thematic and theoretical-methodological breadth of the research conducted over the two decades. Among the selected studies, morphosyntactic research predominates, accounting for 62.5% of the analyzed corpus, followed by phonetic-phonological studies, with 20.3%, and textual-discursive studies, with 17.2%. The diversity of the phenomena investigated, including processes of variation and change, demonstrates the Iboruna Database's capacity to support different research agendas and to enable analyses of language in use on the basis of a common empirical foundation. The results also highlight the database's relevance for documenting the linguistic variety of northwestern São Paulo and Brazilian Portuguese, as well as for researcher training. The twenty years of the ALIP Project and its database represent not only the consolidation of an important linguistic archive but also the continuation of a scientific legacy that is fundamental to Brazilian linguistics. The research developed using the Iboruna Database demonstrates its capacity to bring together different theoretical and methodological perspectives and to contribute to linguistic description grounded in data from language in use.