Lexical-semantic study of Eighteenth Century vocabulary in Paranaguá

Author(s)

Celciane Alves Vasconcelos

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2013-03-11

Examining board members

Manoel Mourivaldo Santiago Almeida; Vanderci de Andrade Aguilera; Joyce Elaine de Almeida Baronas; Osvaldo Humberto Leonardi Ceschin; Maria Valiria Aderson de Mello Vargas

• Advisor: Manoel Mourivaldo Santiago Almeida

Abstract

The overall objective of this thesis is to study the lexicon in the city of Paranaguá-PR, proposing a discussion on maintenance, tendency to maintenance, disuse and tendency to disuse of lexicon extracted from eighteenth-century manuscript sources, dating from the same locality. For this study, in addition to scanned handwritten documents, dictionaries of Portuguese and oral material are used. The theoretical and methodological basis that guides this research is the Dialectology, but also the basis used in philological research (document editing), sociolinguistic research (field research and analysis of lexicon considering social cells) and lexicographic research (preparing the glossary) .The specific objectives are: (i) to trace the historical background of the study area to assist in understanding the socio-cultural aspects, (ii) to do the semi-diplomatic editing, followed by facsimile reproduction of the handwritten documents, providing the basis for characterizing the state of eighteenth-century language, (iii) to select the lexicon to be tested in the city of Paranaguá, and, from them, to prepare the glossary seeking to present the definition of lexical items with meanings and accreditations extracted from the written corpus , (iv) to collect oral data with the aid of a lexical-semantic questionnaire, adopting for the selection of informants the following social variables: age, sex, place of birth and education level, and finally (v) to verify, from the lexicon tested, the level of maintenance, tendency to maintenance, disuse and tendency to disuse, regarding the meanings recorded in the documents in question. Based on the analysis of the context of the speech of informants from Paranaguá, it was found that, in general, there is a tendency to disuse of lexicon extracted from the written corpus, especially by the informants from the first age group. In short, it is expected that the results of this research can contribute and, at the same time, provide reliable data for linguistic studies on the state of written language during the eighteenth century and its echoes on the Portuguese variety spoken in Paranaguá and, by extension, in Brazil. (AU)