Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: THAYNA CRISTINA ANANIAS

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : THAYNA CRISTINA ANANIAS
DATE: 31/08/2023
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Online
TITLE:

Iconicity in the lexicon of Brazilian Portuguese

KEY WORDS:

iconicity; age of acquisition; lexical category; concreteness

PAGES: 72
BIG AREA: Linguística, Letras e Artes
AREA: Linguística
SUMMARY:

Iconicity is a widely researched linguistic aspect by different areas (linguists,
biologists, psychologists, etc.) and by different theories within a specific area, such as
linguistics (formalism and functionalism, for example). Therefore, the concept
attributed to iconicity also touches on different particularities. Specifically for this
research, we understand it as a similarity between linguistic form (whether written,
sound or gestural) and referent (as object, feeling, action, etc.). As far as we know, there
is not yet a research that investigates iconicity in the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) lexicon,
so we aim to fill this gap. Thus, we propose to replicate the experiment by Perry,
Perlman and Lupyan (2015) and collect the iconicity rating for a sample of 529 BP
words. The authors whom we are based seek to investigate, mainly, the relationship
between iconicity rating, lexical category and age of acquisition of words in English and
Spanish taken from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories
(MCDI) wordbank. To statistically observe the role of iconicity in this relationship,
other variables must be raised, such as frequency and concreteness. The results by Perry,
Perlman and Lupyan (2015) indicate that words with higher scores for iconicity, both in
English and in Spanish, also show a higher percentage of learning by children aged up
to 30 months, i.e., words that are more easily learned also have a higher iconicity score.
Perry, Perlman and Lupyan (2015) also consider a typological hypothesis in their
conclusion: languages that present similar linguistic structural patterns will present
similar results in experiments like these. It is expected that the results in Spanish are in
line with those in Portuguese, since these are languages whose verbs represent the
direction of action, and the surrounding words can represent the mode of action (verb-
framed languages). To investigate and relate these issues to Portuguese, we replicated
the authors' experiments. Our results confirm the indications of English and Spanish:
more easily learned words also have a higher iconicity score in BP. As for the
relationship between iconicity ratings and lexical category, as well as in English and
Spanish, the categories with the highest ratings in BP were onomatopoeias and
interjections, followed by adjectives. However, they did not follow the expectation of
the typological hypothesis indicated by the authors: there was no significant difference
between verbs and nouns in Spanish; on the other hand, verbs obtained higher scores
than nouns in BP, as well as in English.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1153427 - MAHAYANA CRISTINA GODOY
Interna - 1393548 - NEDJA LIMA DE LUCENA
Externa à Instituição - LUCIANA LUCENTE - UFMG