A toponímia em Sergipe: descrição e análise

Abstract

This PhD thesis describes and analyzes 464 settlements names in Sergipe in order to identify ethnolinguistic, linguistic and socio-historical elements of this Brazilian state through its urban and rural placenames, comprising that toponyms constitute linguistic and extralinguistic receptacles of society-nature symbiosis and can outline some denominators’ aspects. The toponyms were collected in an official database that compose the Cadastro de localidades brasileiras selecionadas – CLBS (IBGE, 201-) and codified by the description of grammatical, semantic-etymological and encyclopedic data. Taken under the theoretical and methodological postulates of Onomastics and Toponomastics, this study is in line with the coding and analysis procedures proposed by Dick (1990a, 1990b, 2004, 2007). Among the elements treated from the toponymic signs, their linguistic origin, morphological structure, and semantic motivation, as well as toponymic change processes stand out. Research results obtained confirm the arguments presented by the toponymic studies of Brazil on the ethnolinguistic aspect: there is a massive toponymy in the Portuguese language, followed by Tupi names and a minimal portion of African names. The qualitative and quantitative treatment of the corpus allowed to verify onomastic tendencies of physical and anthropocultural natures. In the first group, the toponymic motivation highlights geomorphological, hydrographic, and local vegetation elements. The latter, with 19%, is the most productive taxonomy of the whole corpus. Among the taxonomies of anthropocultural nature, probably due to the predominantly rural nature of the selected toponyms, there are the ergotopônimos, which print material culture tools, the sociotopônimos, which emphasize the collective aspect of the human agglomerations, and the religious names, as well as the memorialization of personalities of diverse sociopolitical range, especially referring to men and facts related to local or national history. The georeferenced data allowed the cartographic description, of which the debate about shift-names (Stewart, 1954) examples is highlighted. The toponymic changes related to the cities of Sergipe also allowed to describe conditioning factors of these processes and to list grammatical, semantic, and socio-historical aspects of different synchrony. As Appendices, we present the codification of the data, either in tables, for the toponyms of agglomerations subordinated to the municipalities (villages, villages, settlement projects), or in lexicographical-toponymic fiches (DICK, 2004) for municipal nomenclature. Thus, by the epistemological affiliation and its analytical treatment, this thesis establishes the bases for the future constitution of the Toponymic Atlas of Sergipe.