Alcunhas no ambiente rural: um estudo de caso

Abstract

Anthroponymy is a branch of onomastics that deals with personal names. In a community, these names distinguish individuals and facilitate their social relationships. They can also characterize a particular era and preserve information intrinsic to the culture and history of those communities. This paper, a segment of the master’s thesis entitled “Anthroponyms: a didactic proposal at Antônio Sandim de Rezende Municipal School in Terenos/MS” (Costa, 2020), focuses on nicknames, part of the language’s lexical inventory, and their applicability in written productions by students in Middle School. In this context, we aim to understand how the nicknames used by residents of the Nova and Velha Colonies reveal cultural aspects of that community. To that end, we set the following objectives: (i) to inventory anthroponyms through interviews in order to support textual productions in the genres Literary Memory and Chronicle, carried out within activities developed for the Portuguese Language Olympiad “Writing the Future,” with a view to recognizing the community’s particularities in assigning nicknames and thereby contributing to the preservation of that social group’s memory; and (ii) to analyze the motivational factors implicit in the inventoried anthroponyms to verify the intentionality contained in those nicknames. For this purpose, we drew on epistemologies of lexicology and anthroponymy, especially the contributions of Biderman (2001), Oliveira and Isquerdo (2001), Amaral and Seide (2020), among others. During the research, we inventoried 153 anthroponyms, which in turn resulted in 38 textual productions: 17 literary memories and 21 chronicles. These nicknames served as a tool to connect oral accounts and identity markers to textual productions.

The data showed that the most productive anthroponyms are linked to behavioral factors, morphological alterations of given names, and physical characteristics. When producing their texts, the students acknowledged the community’s use of anthroponyms and made explicit its traditions, beliefs, habits, and values—markers of its cultural identity. Therefore, we realize that anthroponomastic research contributes to the knowledge and preservation of the historical and cultural aspects of a community and combined with teaching, brings the student closer to their reality, making learning meaningful.