Jovens e idosos escolhem as mesmas palavras?

Abstract

In this research, one of the aspects focused by the Linguistic Atlas Project of Brazil (ALiB Project), the Lexicon of the Brazilian Portuguese, is addressed. Therefore, this paper investigates how individuals language presents specific linguistic marks that construct, maintain and project the age-group identity in the questionnaire of the ALiB Project, based on the use of the lexicon as a generational factor of individuals within their age-group. The methodology used was based on the performance of the following stages: 1) reading of the theoretical texts related to the proposed theme; 2) choice and formation of the corpus, made up of inquests of the ALiB Project in different capitals; 3) analysis of the corpus in order to verify linguistic marks that transmit the construction, projection and maintenance of the age-group social identity. The term identity is being construed here as “social identity”, which, according to Ochs (1993, p.289), is understood as a “term that can encompass a great number of social personae that an individual can claim for himself/herself or attribute to others along his/her life time, and because of that it is neither fixed nor categorical. The analysis of the selected inquiries try to study the lexical items present in the semantic field of life cycles (menstruation and go into menopause), with the aim of verifying the lexical selection carried out by the informers from different agegroups in the different capitals of the country. The analysis of the corpus enabled the realization of the register and the documentation of lexical diversity of the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil, according to the principles of the modern Pluridimensional Geolinguistics in which the register follows specific parameters.