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Footballs: a corpus-driven analysis of football lexicon in Brazilian Portuguese and British English

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Author(s):
Sabrina Matuda
Total Authors: 1
Document type: Doctoral Thesis
Press: São Paulo.
Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
Defense date:
Examining board members:
Stella Esther Ortweiler Tagnin; Gladis Maria de Barcellos Almeida; Paola Giustina Baccin; Adauri Brezolin; Adriana Zavaglia
Advisor: Stella Esther Ortweiler Tagnin
Abstract

The primary aim of this research is to present a model for a football dictionary consisting of entries marked by cultural differences between Brazil and England. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that the different ways of playing, the football history in each culture, the cultural appropriation of rules in England and Brazil and other historical and social factors have contributed to the creation of the football lexicon in Portuguese and English. The theoretical dimensions underlying this study are Corpus Linguistics, Textual Terminology and Technical Translation as a communicative act subject to cultural conditions, areas which share an interest in observing language in its actual context of occurrence. We also highlighted the anthropological form-representation concept to better explain the differences between Brazilian football and English football. In order to carry out our analysis, we compiled a comparable study corpus which comprises 469,765 words in Portuguese and 600,079 in English. Each subcorpus consists of five categories of texts: match results, match description, match reports with comments from Internet users, news about players and coaches purchase and sale and news on the position of the teams in the championships. The corpus was annotated with part-of-speech tags through Tree Tagger and investigated with the linguistic analysis software WordSmith Tools. Seventeen culturally marked terms and specialized lexical combinations (CLEs) gave rise to the case studies which constitute the dictionary model. The analysis of these cases revealed two important aspects: 1) Brazilian football is often associated with words like \'dribble\', \'creativity\', \'spontaneity\', \'ability\', \'beauty\' and \'ginga\' whereas English football is almost exclusively associated with words of strength and speed; 2) the historical and cultural aspects and the history of football in Brazil and England have direct impact on the football terminology in Portuguese and English, a conclusion which confirms our initial hypothesis. A model of dictionary entries is attached to this dissertation. (AU)

FAPESP's process: 13/07062-1 - Football, society and language
Grantee:Sabrina Matuda
Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate