Tradição e memória: um estudo antroponímico dos nomes de logradouros da cidade de Ponte Nova - Minas Gerais

Abstract

Humankind uses the lexicon to express its ideas and feelings, to express its universe. Basedon this principle, this research aimed to contribute to the cultural memory of the city of PonteNova (MG) through the investigation of urban toponymy, more specifically the names of thestreets motivated by people's names. We adopted, as theoretical-methodological principles,recommendations from Toponymy and related disciplines, with emphasis on the taxonomicclassification model of Dick (1990). Our research is part of the ATEMIG Project - ToponymicAtlas of the State of Minas Gerais, headquartered at the Faculty of Letters of UFMG. ThisProject is characterized as a study of the names of places that cover the entire territory ofMinas Gerais. According to a common methodology used by different researchers in severalstates, the ATEMIG Project adopts the "area method" or dialectological method used byDauzat (1926) and the taxonomic categories that represent the main motivational patterns oftoponyms in Brazil, suggested by Dick (1990). The city of Ponte Nova, located in the Zona daMata Mineira, has 57,390 inhabitants and 549 urban addresses, excluding those which are partof the two city's districts (Pontal and Vau-Açu). Our corpus consisted of the 410anthropotoponyms present in the total of urban addresses, presented in lexicographic files,adapted from the model of Filgueiras (2011). This work led us to the presentation of a newclassification proposal for anthropotoponyms and to the construction of a biographicaldictionary, composed of the names of the characters who are honored with their names in theurban addresses.