Neologismos em construção: uma abordagem cognitivo-construcional para a análise de novos verbos do português brasileiro

Abstract

This research investigates novel words, known as neologisms, focusing on the grammatical category "verb." We aim to analyze cognitive and constructional aspects involved in the creation of verbal neologisms in Brazilian Portuguese on social media. The analysis includes 101 neologisms related to the conceptual domains of TIME (such as ‘sextar’), LEISURE (‘praiar’), WORK (‘jobar’), GAMES (‘tankar’), SOCIAL MEDIA (‘cancelar’), INFORMATICS (‘googlar’), BEHAVIOR (‘pistolar’), and RELATIONSHIPS (‘shippar’). Our theoretical framework is based on Construction Grammar (Croft, 2001, 2007, 2022; Hoffmann, 2019, 2020, 2022a, 2022b), Conceptual Blending (Fauconnier; Turner, 2006), cognitive concepts such as construal operations (Croft; Cruse, 2004), and creative concepts such as F(ixed) and E(xtending) Creativity (Sampson, 2016). Our objective is to explain, in an articulated way, the cognitive, constructional, and creative mechanisms present in Brazilian verbal neologisms. The hypothesis is that the creation and use of verbal neologisms operate through conceptual blending, integrating activities evoked from any semantic class (object, action, property) into a novel action concept, which is profiled with salience as a single lexical construction, encoded by prototypical verbal strategies. The neologisms were collected from public social media profiles between March 2022 and November 2024. The novelty of the collected data was verified in relevant Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries, and the confirmed neologisms were grouped into conceptual domains with a minimum of 6 exemplars, discarding non-representative domains. The results show that the collected neologisms constitute an integrated constructional network across various levels: at the most abstract level, with constructions like X-ar, em-X-ar, X-izar, re-X, des-X, and in-X; at intermediate levels, with abstract constructions integrated with base concepts to express novel actions; and at a specific level, with neological occurrences that instantiate the more schematic levels. We understand that formatives such as -ar and -izar are morphosyntactic strategies that encode verbal constructions, profiling the expression of activities related to the frame/script of a conceptual base, which can be an object, a property, or an action. These activities are projected from diverse knowledge of our world-experience and blended to create a complex concept of action. The neologism ‘praiar’, for instance, blends and conceptualizes into a single lexical construction various types of activities captured in the ‘praia’ (beach) leisure frame (a concept of object): sunbathing, swimming, playing sports, meditating, reading a book, dating, eating local foods, etc. The most representative verbal neologism in our data proved to be an instance of X-ar, based in object concepts and F-Creativity (productive); we also noted the expressive origin of the data in English bases, motivated by the dominance of that language in social networks and its global prestige in some areas. We conclude that we create novel verbs to express a complex action, through a lexical construction that cognitively blends a network of encyclopedic knowledge, emphasizing activities and processes of a concept. Moreover, we found that non-prototypically verbal strategies, such as re-X, des-X, and in-X, can also express novel actions. Finally, the results of this research served as the foundation for creating a repository of Brazilian Portuguese neologisms called Neoteca de Palavras, that aims at the registration and scientific dissemination of neology.