Nas cacimbas do Rio Pardo: um estudo léxico-cultural

Abstract

This study aims to conduct a descriptive study of this lexicon in nine counties in the north of Minas Gerais, which are: Águas Vermelhas, Berizal, Ninheira, Taiobeiras, Indaiabira, São João do Paraíso, Rio Pardo de Minas, Santo Antônio do Retiro and Montezuma , all bathed in the Pardo River Basin. Historically this river is considered by scholars a major water courses for the internalization of Europe in Minas Gerais state since the seventeenth century. The researched area still shows important historically to be inserted in an old way of cattlemen and drovers coming from Bahia and Pernambuco to supply the mining towns of the south-central state from the early eighteenth century. In this regional environment, our overall goal was to perform a lexical-cultural analysis, focusing on the close relationship between language, society and culture. The study was based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of linguistic anthropology (Duranti and Hymes), Sociolinguistics (Labov and Milroy), Lexicology and Lexicography (Matoré and Biderman), focusing on the lexicon, especially in diatopical and diachronic perspectives. Following the laboviano model, we start from the present, to collect our data through interviews with 53 people with low education, whose age approaching 70 years, residents in the cities already mentioned. Subsequently these interviews were transcribed relying on pre-established to be subjected to analysis rules. Then we went back to the past to consult dictionaries of the eighteenth century (Bluteau), XIX (Morais), first half of the twentieth century (Laudelino Freire), we return to the present, consulting dictionaries published in the twentieth century, in order to make comparisons between these periods . We identified cases of linguistic archaisms and retentions, language changes over time, regionalisms, lexical influences of Bahia and other states in the northeastern region of the country, as well as the influence of social networks to form part of the lexicon of the region. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data demonstrated the existence of a vocabulary that rescues historic, social and cultural rights of the people of the area surveyed aspects, demonstrating that from the study of the lexicon, one of the pillars of the language, we know much of the habits and traditions of a society.