Toponímia, história e memória: nomes das ruas do bairro Centro da cidade de Santa Maria/RS

Abstract

Toponymy, according to Dick (1990), is one of the most significant human activities, especially because it reflects man’s understanding of his reality. Therefore, through toponymic studies, it is possible to verify the way people use language to assign meaning to the places they live. In this paper, we aim to make a toponymic survey of the streets in downtown Santa Maria city and observe, based on Dick (1992), the motivation for naming of such places. The corpus consists of 57 street names and was selected based on Law Nº. 5608, of January 5, 2012 (SANTA MARIA, 2012), which governs the designation of public spaces in the city. In general, there is a predominance of anthropotoponyms and axiotoponyms, whose honored people were renowned ones from the city, which seems to indicates the intention to keep their memory alive.