Hypercorrection is actually an error – 08/03/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

On February 26, under the title “Roberto Jefferson’s defense asks for trial for bodily injury and asks…”, Folha brought subsidies to support the old discussion about grammatical errors.

Wait – grammatical error? There are those who say that it “does not exist”, since any use of the language would be legitimate. I hope to demonstrate in this column that the error does exist, although it is not always where we have been trained to believe it is.

How about looking for him, for a change, not in informal messages from people with low education but in the very formal 126-page piece in which Roberto Jefferson’s defense lawyers ask the Federal Court that the former president of the PTB be tried for bodily harm mild and not for attempted murder?

Among other very strange uses, unfortunately common in the patois that Brazilian society has become accustomed to tolerating under the name of legalese, there is a big mistake, and in double dose, right in the sentence that the newspaper highlighted under the blue thorns:

“The court order restoring the preventive detention of the now Defendant is not a legal act because Minister Alexandre de Moraes is a notoriously incompetent authority to prosecute and judge Mr. Roberto Jefferson”.

If you still haven’t found the error, read again. It’s a good one, capable of making us reflect on how usage erodes old rules –but not yet, not so soon!– and, above all, on a fascinating linguistic phenomenon called hypercorrection.

Search time ended. Feedback: the sentence signed by the lawyers João Pedro Barreto, Juliana David and Fernanda Carvalho uses the expression “tratar-se de” as a subject, as if it were a synonym for “to be”.

“The court order… is not a question” means “the court order is not”. And “Alexandre de Moraes is treated” should be “Alexandre de Moraes is”. This is an error as widespread as it is grammatically indisputable.

“Tretarse de” is a crystallized, fixed formula that, depending on the analysis, can be seen as impersonal or as endowed with an indeterminate subject (indicated by the pronoun “se”).

This means that it is not inflected in the plural (we say “it’s about lies”, never “it’s about lies”) and that one should never make it a “being” in a jacket and tie.

Due to linguistic insecurity, fear of making mistakes, it is common for people to embellish their prose, changing for example having to owning, being to meeting, anything or person previously mentioned by (aaargh!) “the same”.

This path contrary to everything that sounds natural, colloquial, too often leads to inelegance and a no-man’s land in which we reject the grammar introjected by every speaker without reaching the promised land of normative grammar.

This is what is called hypercorrection. The name may suggest something very correct, but it is a red herring. Hypercorrection is an error, that reckless search for correction that goes beyond the point.

As usage is paramount and the cultured norm is ultimately dictated by the literate strata of society, it is likely that in some time its high incidence in press articles, academic articles and legal pieces will take this “treating yourself to” with subject to normalization. This is how languages ​​work.

But it’s early. While this does not happen, it is convenient to be careful with an error that, for doing all the choreography of grammatical oppression without even having normative credentials for that, deserves to be denounced.

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