A árvore da vida: terminologia da cera de carnaúba no português do Brasil

Abstract

The present paper aims at describing and analyzing the specialized vocabulary employed along the productive chain of carnaúba wax in Caucaia, a town in the metropolitan area of Fortaleza. Two conceptual fields were considered: the artisan and the industrial wax production domains. A 321-entry glossary was then compiled, containing the representative terms extracted from the verbal data provided by the 34 subjects who took part in this study. This research works from a socioterminologic and socioterminographic perspective, taking into consideration both linguistic and social aspects of the individuals involved. The importance of such a study is made clear by the widely-felt need for systematization and organization of the terms coming from the field at hand, thus offering our society further information on this specific area. It also contributes for the enrichment of the Socioterminology area by offering this field some insights on the verbal modality of the language, which still remains a rarely visited modality. In this paper, the analysis of the terminologic variation has been accomplished, the choice of terms and its variants by the subjects being determined by their specific speech production conditions. The analysis is essentially qualitative, resulting in the description of the lexical-semantic and morphosintactic aspects of the terminology at hand.