Desbravando a Amazônia Ocidental Brasileira: estudo toponímico dos acidentes humanos e físicos do Acre

Abstract

Toponymy, a branch of onomastics, is the linguistic science which aims at studying the names of physical and human geographic features, from the analysis of the language-culture-society. This research intended to inventory, describe and analyze the toponyms human accidents (state micro-regions, municipalities) and physical (rivers) of the Western Brazilian Amazon, i.e. the state of Acre, in order to verify to what extent these toponyms portray reality physicalgeographical and socio-cultural in the appointment of such spaces. This research is guided by the following hypothesis: Acre’s toponymy preserves linguistic, socio-historical, cultural and physical-geographical particularities characteristics of the region, that influenced the denominator the act of naming. Data were collected mainly throug Political and Administrative Map of Acre (2006), scale 1: 1000 000, provided by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE-AC). We adopted Dick’s theoretical and methodological approach, and the theoretical principles of lexicology and semantics, considering prominent issues concerning the construction of the meaning of lexical items associated with toponymic categories. We adopted, for the distribution of toponymic signs collected, Salazar-Quijada’s terminology: macrotoponyms, for the appointments of State and Micro-regions; microtoponyms for the municipalities, and place names, for appointments rivers. The results showed, compared to macrotoponyms a complete duct motivating influence of physical nature, because all the place names recorded fall compared to tax hydrotoponyms (100.0%). This shows that the current regional water reflected completely the geographical nomenclature of the state and micro-regions. Comparatively to microtoponyms, municipalities, however, the prevailing motivation nature-cultural anthropology, since taxes were recorded as the most productive namely, historiotoponyms (38.1%) and etnotoponyms (13.7%). The toponyms human accidents, in a general way, showed the superiority of the motivational factors related to nature and cultural anthropology (67.9%) if compared to factors of physical nature (32.1%). Concerning to physical accidents of place names motivational factors of nature and cultural anthropology (50.0%) were predominant taking as parameter those of physical nature (36.7%). The most productive taxes were zootoponyms (16.7%) dimensiotoponyms (10.0%) and antrotoponyms (10.0%). To summarize, the analysis of Acre landforms toponymic showed that in the construction of the meaning of signs toponymic, linguistic and extralinguistic elements cooccur. Acre’s toponyms are generally motivated by socio-historical, cultural and physical geography constraints. The results, in totum, confirm the hypothesis which founds our research.