O léxico dos relacionamentos amorosos da língua inglesa na Sitcom Friends

Abstract

The aim of this work was to build a lexical-semantic field of love of English with the lexical units found in the subtitles of the first and last episodes of each one of the five first seasons of the sitcom Friends. In the sitcom, the exposition, the conflict and the denouement and the climax all take place in an episode of less than half an hour. It is a lexical-semantic field which does not contain all the English lexical units related to the theme love, but only the ones found in the chosen corpus, and the research was restricted to the romantic and/or sexual aspects of love, specific of the relationships of couples. We used the terminology of Pottier (1978), who classifies the lexias (lexical units) as simple, composed, complex and textual, and we organized the lexical-semantic field in a taxonomic structure, according to the methodology described by Cruse (1986). In order to identify the common meaning traces that allowed the inclusion of the lexias into the lexical-semantic field and their grouping in subfields, one monolingual (English) unabridged dictionary, two monolingual (English) dictionaries for learners of English and one bilingual (English-Portuguese) dictionary were used, along with the analysis of the contexts of occurrence. 125 lexias were mapped and ten sub-fields were built: the sub-field flirt, the sub-field date, the sub-field relationship, the subfield feeling, the sub-field physical contact, the sub-field wedding, the sub-field marriage, the sub-field sex, the sub-field breakup and the sub-field people.