Da trilha ao caminho: um estudo do rural e do urbano no léxico de falantes da região Sudeste do Brasil

Abstract

The vocabulary collection of a social group portrays aspects of the identity, worldview, beliefs, values and traditions of that group. The lexicon thus constitutes the way that allows the speaker to perceive and represent the environment in which he is inserted, enabling him to name all beings and referents of the physical and sociocultural environments to which he belongs. This work has as a broader objective to discuss the regional lexicon, analyzing the question of the rural/urban relationship in the vocabulary of speakers from small towns in the interior of the Southeast region of Brazil, focusing on the perspective of identifying and analyzing traits of lexical conservatism. . Thus, this research seeks, based on geolinguistic data, to verify to what extent spatial, historical and sociocultural factors can influence the lexical choice of speakers. Therefore, it is based on theoretical-methodological assumptions of Lexicology, Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Ethnolinguistics as well as theoretical knowledge of Anthropology and Rural Sociology, in view of the research approach focused on the question of the concepts of rural and urban materialized in the lexicon of the investigated group. The corpus of the study consisted of a total of 1,019 lexical units documented as answers to seven questions of the Semantic-Lexical Questionnaire (QSL), of the Project Atlas Linguístico do Brasil - ALiB, linked to the semantic areas of agropastoral and fauna activities, namely : QSL/44 – “the purple tip on the banana bunch”; QSL/54 – “the wooden frame, which is placed around the neck of animals (pig, calf/calf, sheep, cow), so that they do not cross the fence”; QSL/61 – “the man who is hired to work in someone else's fields, who is paid for a day's work”; QSL/62 – “What do you open with a machete, a sickle to go through a thicket? " ; QSL/63 – “...the path in the pasture where grass doesn't grow anymore, because both the animal and the man pass through there”; QSL/65 – “the very small bird, which flaps its wings very fast, has a long beak and stays still in the air” and QSL/66 – “the bird that makes a house with earth, on poles, in trees and even in corners of the house” (NATIONAL COMMITTEE, 2001, p. 25-27). The answers were provided by 156 native speakers from 39 localities in the interior of the states of Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro, members of the ALiB Project's network of points in the Southeast region of Brazil. According to the profile established by the ALiB, in each locality, four informants born and raised in the locality and with parents from the same linguistic region, of both sexes, of two age groups (18 to 30 years and 50 to 65 years) were interviewed. and with schooling up to Elementary School. Data were examined from diatopic perspectives, demonstrating the areal distribution of documented lexical units and lexical-semantic. The analyzes demonstrated, for example, the presence of the lexical item path of generic use to denominate “picada” and “rail/trail” as well as the registration of the item “picada”, which allowed to identify traces of rurality and at the same time of urbanization in the speech of the participants. investigated groups, a fact that confirms the existence of a continuum of rural and urban in the lexical norm of this group. It also pointed out data that reveal remnants of conservative lexical forms, possibly indicating influences resulting from historical, geographical and sociocultural aspects, in the speech of the groups under analysis, as is the case of the lexical items trieiro, carreiro and rastro, the first two particular to the State of Minas Gerais and the last, only in Rio de Janeiro, as a designation for “trail/track”. Finally, this study ratified the interface between lexicon, culture and society. Key words: Regional lexicon; Rural/urbano continuum; Lexical conservatism; Linguistic Atlas of Brazil; Southeast region.