Amizade, friendship e freundschaft: especificidades culturais de construções metafóricas utilizadas por participantes de comunidades virtuais para falar de amizade

Abstract

This research proposes to do a comparison of the ways in which participants of virtual communities conveyed in Portuguese, English, and German speak about friendship, investigating primarily the metaphors they use. Such a comparison is important because in different cultures, they being either national cultures or minor social groups, people not onlyspeak different languages, but also communicate in different ways (SAPIR, 1949; WHORF, 1956; KÖVECSES, 2000; WIERZBICKA, 2003). For this purpose, we considered the following virtual communities: Yahoo!and LinkedIn. Within the Yahoo! community, we sought for questions about friendship on the websites Yahoo! Respostas (in Portuguese), Answers(in English), and Clever(in German). Within the LinkedIn community, we searched for questions about this topic on forums in each of the three languages under investigation. Considering that friendship may be described as either a feeling or a relationship (HOUAISS, 2001), we analyzed the metaphorical expressions found in the data, since metaphorical language is often used to talk about feelings, emotions or relationships (KÖVECSES, 2000, p. 4). This study was conducted considering the hypothesis that, in addition to similarmetaphors to be found in all data sets, some metaphors would be found in the Portuguese data, but not in the German or English data sets and vice-versa. Moreover, there would likely be differences in frequency distributions, that is, even expressions shared by all three language systems would be used more frequently in one of them as compared to the others. These characteristics could indeed be observed in the analysis and comparison of these data. Ultimately, definitions of amizade,friendship,and Freundschaft applicable to each of thecontexts (virtual communities conveyed in specific languages) were prepared using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). In such definitions, an attempt was made to highlight the cultural specificities underlying language use in each of the investigated contexts.