A criatividade nas denominações de operações policiais: um estudo preliminar de campos semânticos a partir de um corpus de jornais mineiros

Abstract

The lexicon is constantly undergoing changes, so it is important to study transformations that the collection of all the words of a language presents. Changes in the lexicon can be identified in the newspapers, one of the suitable places where operations realized by police forces are disclosed. As part of these actions is named, they cause interest and they can be characterized as a linguistic fact. Based on this question, this work consists of the study of police operation names taken from a corpus composed by news of popular newspapers and quality papers, from Minas Gerais state, because each publication profile has its importance. The main issues that guided this research were: the possibility to define the naming pattern of the police forces; what are the language resources used in the nomination process and if there is difference between popular newspaper and quality paper in the form of presenting these names. The theories that underpinned this study were Lexicology, Semantic Fields, Onomastic, Metaphor, Neologism and Journalism, popular and quality paper. The methodology was based on the concepts of Corpus Linguistics, which allows the study of empirical linguistic data in an extensive amount of authentic texts. From the identification of the ten largest cities in Minas Gerais, it was selected 11 newspapers and 1,310 news items were collected. With the help of WordSmith Tools (version 6), it was possible to identify 365 names of police operations and the meaning of each operation. When corpus did not present definitions, it was used the resource "define:" plus the name of the operation in Google or two dictionaries, Aulete Digital and Michaelis, were consulted. The operation names were classified in Semantic Fields to identify possible patterns of naming of the police forces. The classification resulted in 38 Semantic Fields plus the field of undefined cases, which are names that did not fit into a categorization. From the classification and the analysis, it was possible to conclude that the pattern of naming of the police forces is based on the change of meaning of the word by means of semantic neology and metaphor. The Semantic Fields that allude to places, loanwords, mythologies, especially the Greek mythology, and dates are preference of this professional group. The contribution of this work is the study of the lexical process of neology and the identification of the pattern of denominating actions.