Léxico e identidade lingüística: formação do vocabulário do português-brasileiro pelos estrangeirismos

Abstract

This Dissertation is grounded within the History and Portuguese Language Description research line, of the Post-Graduation Studies in Portuguese Language of Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo and comprehends an exploratory investigation, whose object of study is limited to the foreign words present in the Brazilian Portuguese language. The use of foreign words is seen as a phenomenon whose milestone is inserted within the history of composition of a certain language and reaches any coexistence. Grounded by the principles and presuppositions of Lexicology, and guided by a general objective to try to understand the strategies adopted by users of the Brazilian Portuguese language in the process of transference of foreign words in linguistic loans the investigative route is guided by three different focuses. One of them emphasizes the cultural and historical point of view, giving importance to different contexts of human social formations, in the flow of their constructions, in order to place in them the composition of the Brazilian Portuguese language as a product of contact between different peoples, users of different languages; another one, broader, concerns social, historical and cultural contexts that comprise human social formations supported by the development of technologies; and the last one is limited to linguistic studies that mainly focus on the lexical, aiming at determining the strategies implied in the process of nationalization of foreign words that, in the current coexistence, were or are being incorporated into the Brazilian Portuguese language vocabulary. The methodological procedure implied the selection and analysis of a corpus, in order to provide examples, comprised of words from the English language, selected from different semantic fields, in order to focus on the transference processes of foreign words in lexical loans, paying special attention to the comparison with the foundation milestone of the categories: projection, transfer and identity: those that ensure, by analogical principles, identify the non familiar by the familiar . It is important to notice that, for the analyses, the words and their respective contents were considered in their phonological, morphosyntatic and semantic dimensions. The results obtained show that the acquisition and use of new words, as well as of a foreign language, never take place in an isolated manner, but in the flow of speech and is grounded on the previous knowledge of the speaker. Therefore, the use of foreign words requires from the user who does not speak the English language a greater effort of interpretation and comprehension, even when the cultural repertoire of the English language is used in sentences structured by phrasal categories of the Portuguese language. It was also noticed that the words become Portuguese words in the phonetic point of view and, when integrated into the vocabulary system, become productive in a way that the new lexical matrix begins to support the product of new vocabulary forms; therefore, the loans are explained by the lexical productivity