Meanings of 'nação' in 'capítulos de história colonial': for a semantic analysis of a text

This text aims at presenting a brief analysis of the meanings of the phrases nação and nações (nation, from Portuguese, and its plural form, nations) in the book Capítulos de História Colonial, by Capistrano de Abreu. In order to get to the results, our analysis was based on the Semantics of the Events developed by Guimarães (2002) and the Semantic Analysis of Texts, currently proposed by the same author (GUIMARÃES, 2011). Our main objective is to show how it is possible to make a semantic analysis of a phrase from the various relationships of integration among such phrase, utterances in which it appears and the text as a whole. The result of the analysis show the way the relationship between the present time of enunciation and the movements of rewriting focus on replacing Brasil for nação in the text by Capistrano de Abreu.