Registro, descrição e análise motivacional dos sinais de cidades do estado de Goiás: a Toponímia em Libras numa interface com a Linguística de Corpus

Abstract

This thesis presents research of interaction between Toponymy, Libras, and Corpus Linguistics, which aims to investigate how the toponymic lexicon of the state of Goiás is materialized in Libras, through the apprehension, description, analysis, and registration of toponymic signs that name some cities in the state, looking for evidence and linguistic and extralinguistic influences in the nomination process. The toponymic lexicon is recognized for evidencing the physical, geographic, and cultural aspects of a given place, so it carries a motivated character structure. Dick (1990) reinforces that the toponym, unlike other language elements, has a process that makes it possible to identify its motivation, since it is driven by factors of different semantic content. From interviews with deaf people born and/or living in the state of Goiás and information collected from websites of teaching material for teaching Libras, we built the original corpus of this study, which gave rise to three other sub-corpora: the transcription of the interviews into Portuguese, which enabled the identification of the toponymic lexicon; the phonetic-phonological description of the toponyms in Libras, which allowed the analyses regarding the motivational origin for the creation of the signs under analysis; and the corpus of labeling of the toponyms, which contributed significantly to the verification of our hypothesis regarding the influence of the Portuguese Language in the naming process in Libras, through linguistic borrowing. The tools used in the treatment and management of the toponymic lexicon in question belong to the WordSmith Tools program, version 6.0 (SCOTT, 2012). We established in this research a contrastive study to reveal the aspects and influences present in the toponym naming process in Portuguese Language and in Libras, to identify the idiosyncrasy of the deaf and hearing naming subjects. The toponyms in both languages were analyzed using the taxonomy proposed by Dick (1990), and other taxes developed by other scholars in the area. We developed a bimodal lexicographic-toponym record model, with the purpose of storing the data from the analyses undertaken and created an on-line lexicographic instrument to register the one hundred and twelve (112) toponymic signs collected and analyzed in this research. The analyzes allowed us to verify that, both in Portuguese and in Libras, the motivation for the naming of cities occurred mostly by influence of anthropocultural aspects, thus revealing the intrinsic relationship of the subject nominator to social, cultural, and religious factors. The main contributions of the study include: (i) tracing the toponymic profile of the state of Goiás in Libras, (ii) demonstrating the feasibility of toponymic linguistic analysis in sign language based on Corpus Linguistics, and (iii) strengthening the linguistic studies of Libras about this state.