Variantes lexicais no campo de crenças e religiosidades no sertão alagoano

Abstract

This research aims to describe and analyze the occurrences of lexemes in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese referring to the field of Beliefs and Religion through a quantitative- qualitative bibliographic and field research. We used the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Geolinguistics and Dialectology, considering a network of five municipalities in the Sertão Alagoas: Delmiro Gouveia, Água Branca, Olho d'Água do Casado, Inhapi, and Piranhas. The semantic field we considered in the research is part of the Semantic-Lexical Questionnaire (QSL) of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (ALiB) project, and is composed of eight questions, from which we conducted interviews with 24 informants who meet the criteria defined by ALiB: sedentary dwellers of urban and rural areas of the northeastern sertão, aged 50 and over, of both sexes, with schooling up to elementary school, of different religions (including the self-identified ones without religion). The study led us to realize the vast lexical repertoire of the informants, who presented several lexical variants, both those provided for in the QSL and others, some of which were used to the detriment of those considered taboo by some of the informants. We observed that men were more productive in relation to the quantity of lexical variants and, in general, the data indicate a great linguistic and cultural richness that reflects the knowledge and worldview of its speakers.