A criatividade lexical em textos da área do veganismo: contribuições ao ensino do léxico

Abstract

Change is a notable characteristic of natural languages, and it manifests itself at all linguistic levels, being most explicit at the lexical level. This occurs because the lexicon refl ects the dynamics of the language and follows the changes that occur in society, being a mechanism to express and record the historical and cultural reality, the knowledge of the universe and the worldview of a social group at diff erent times (Ferraz, 2006). The renewal of the lexicon occurs through the obsolescence of certain words that are no longer used and the creation of new lexical items to designate new concepts, such items are called neologisms. Veganism is one of the political and social movements that has led to the creation of neologisms in a notable way in recent years, being a movement with a growing number of followers. With these considerations in mind, the aim of this study is to demonstrate lexical creativity in texts involving veganism, especially those belonging to the advertising genre and published on social networks. To achieve this goal, neologisms generated from diff erent word formation processes were extracted, described and analyzed. These new lexical items were explored in teaching activity proposals aimed at working with the lexicon in the classroom, by using an epilinguistic approach, aiming to contribute to the development of students' lexical competence. The aforementioned can be understood as deep knowledge of words, which involves the ability to understand them in their morphosyntactic structure and in the semantic relationships they establish with other lexical units of the language. The research methodology, supported by previous works (Alves, 2004; Ferraz, 2006, 2019, 2020), was based on the lexicographic criterion for the identifi cation of neologisms, adopting as an exclusion corpus, the type 4 school dictionaries, selected by PNLD-Dicionários 2012, in addition to the online dictionary Caldas Aulete Digital. Thus, with a corpus of neologisms extracted from advertising texts and their analysis, this research can also provide support for the preparation of teaching materials aimed at working with the lexicon in Portuguese language classes, which consider lexical units as eff ective elements of the construction of the text (Antunes, 2012), contributing to the conveyance of a given message. This contribution is justified by the problem concerning the need for updated material that dialogues with the students' reality and by the insuffi cient work with the lexicon in textbooks and in Portuguese classrooms (Cruz, 2015; Cunha, 2012), where usually only some of the word formation processes are superfi cially addressed through the same examples and with no exploration of the meanings involved in the possibilities of constructing new lexical items (Antunes, 2012).