Designations for underwear in Brazil: a geossociocognitive analysis
Dialectoly; Variation; Cognition,Lexicon
Considering a lexical perspective, this research shows a data survey of the denominations for underwear used by speakers living in areas located in the Northeast of Brazil, in order to analyze the semantic-lexical variation in the corpus of the Brazilian Linguistic Atlas Project (ALiB Project) in that area, associated with cognitive implications that interfere in the conceptualization of the underwear items made by the survey speakers. The methodology of this search involved the reading of theoretical texts related to the proposed theme; selection of the corpus, which is formed by data collected in interviews with speakers that live in points located in that Brazilian area, which are parts of the ALiB Project database; analysis of this corpus to verify the relations of use of the lexical variants with social factors, as well as the cognitive processes related to the different answers given by the research participants to the inquirers. Inquiries of speakers were organized into age groups I (18-30 years) and II (50-65 years) of the Lexical Semantic Questionnaire of the ALiB Project, semantic field clothing and accessories (underwear), questions 189 and 190. The speakers were also organized according to their level of education, elementary or university levels, besides the biological genders, man and woman, therefore, aiming to analyze the lexical selection performed by informants from different age groups from different Brazilian northeast cities. Thus, it is intended in this search: (i) to register the denominations for male and female underwears in the Brazilian Northeast; (ii) to analyze the documented items and their relationships with social factors related to the informants; (iii) to systematize the analysis of the data in question to portray, diatopically and socially, the lexical variants in Brazil. The analysis of the corpus allowed the registration of the lexical diversity of Portuguese spoken in Brazil, linked to the speakers’ cognitive processes involved in the naming process of male and female underwear in the northeastern of the country, considering the principles of Multidimensional Dialectology and Cognitive Linguistics.