In search of a semantic characterization of slurs in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 24/04237-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: October 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Renato Miguel Basso
• Grantee: Giovanna Costa Silva
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the linguistic functioning of slurs in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Among the pejorative terms in a language, slurs stand out because they affect not just a single individual, but a group of people, which makes them items with mixed semantic content, contributing to both the veri-conditional dimension and the use-conditional dimension. In addition to developing a non-exhaustive inventory of BP insults and a typology for the terms listed, we intend to theoretically investigate their semantic functioning through an analysis of BP data as proposed by Davis and McCready (2020). This is a topic little explored in Brazil, especially in formal approaches, and we hope that the results will be both analytical and theoretical, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of this linguistic phenomenon.