Menino, guri or pia? a diatopic study on regions Midwest, Southeast and South from the data of Project Linguistic Atlas of Brazil/Menino, guri ou pia? um estudo diatopico nas regooes centrooeste, sudeste e sul a partir dos dados do projeto Atlas Linguistico do Brasil

• Published in: Alfa 2014-07, Vol.58 (2), p.463
• Main Authors: Romano, Valter Pereira, Seabra, Rodrigo Duarte
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• ISSN: 0002-5216

This paper uses as corpus oianalysis the data collected by the Project Linguistic Atlas of Brazil team in three regions: Midwest, Southeast and South. These data refer to the country cities and to the capitals oi each state; they were collected from informants who were selected according to established profiles. On this occasion, the objective was to discuss the diatopical distribution of lexical variants for question number132 -A very young child is called baby. However, when this small kid is 5-10 years old and also is a male person, how is the most commonly used term for calling him?--of Lexical-Semantic Questionnaire (COMITE NACIONAL DO PROJETO ALIB, 2001). The methodology involved descriptive and inferential analysis which were pertinent to the study. Thus, eight hypotheses were tested in order to analyze the behavior and the diatopical distribution of the five most productive variants in the set of answers. The main results indicated that those variants exhibited different behaviors in three different regions: (i) the variant menino showed homogeneous distribution in ten states; (ii) the lexical forms guri and pia had a heterogeneous distribution in the Southern region; (iii) variants of indian etymology (guri and pia) are more representative in the South and Midwest; (iv) there is a greater representation of variant moleque (African etymon) in the Southeast, especially in Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais.