Toponímia em Libras dos Bairros de Santarém/Pará

Abstract

This work has the general objective of describing the toponyms in Libras that designate the 20 neighborhoods of the municipality of Santarém in the State of Pará. The research corpus was the E-book and DVD, entitled Glossário de Sinais Tapajônicos Regionais (Reis; Rocha, 2023). This is a qualitative and documentary research and aims to describe the lexical, morphological and semantic motivations of the toponyms analyzed, through records in lexicographic-toponymic cards. Our theoretical and methodological framework comes from the authors: Dick (1990), Souza-Júnior (2012); Sousa and Quadros (2019); Miranda (2020); Cruz (2020); Albuquerque (2021); Sousa (2022), among others. Our work identified that the toponyms are the result of a double motivation, sometimes an iconic motivation, as it seeks to demonstrate the basis in the bodily and visual experiences of Libras and the motivation of the Portuguese language with characteristics of graphic loans (graphy) that are made through the dactylogical alphabet and (calque) that aligns with a direct translation of the term from Portuguese to Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). As a consequence of the description of the types of morphology, we noticed that this category was mostly shown to be a simple hybrid (18 signs) and two other signs were shown to be simple. This demonstrates how the majority language (Portuguese) interfered in the production of these signs. We observed and proved that the type of sign category was presented with ten signs that were initialized as hybrids, eight signs were shown to be spelled and only two signs were characterized as native/pure. The reason behind the name results from a predominant hand configuration that emulates or describes the written form of the place name in Portuguese. However, the parameters of movement and location of the hands may carry some logo or motivated characteristics based on some physical or cultural attributes of the place. Regarding the motivation of the signs, we observed that (10) signs were shown to be iconic/linguistic borrowings. This category was analyzed because we noticed that among the signs there were characteristics of their own and iconicity and borrowings from the majority language, that is, they sometimes show themselves as references to physical attributes present in the toponyms of each neighborhood and mixed characteristics from finger language (linguistic borrowings), exemplified by the initials of the names of the neighborhoods. We also believe that this research can contribute significantly to the deaf community, as it further reinforces the character that Libras has as a natural language. We emphasize that there are still many linguistic paths to be explored in relation to Libras and that the discussions initiated here will be the subject of greater depth.