Indianist anthroponymy in Alencar's corpus

an etymological, fictional, and contextual analysis

Abstract

Drawing from the perspective of Contextual Fictional Etymology, in this paper we analyze four Indianist anthroponyms, namely, Irapuã, Coatiabo, Maranguab and Abaeté, found in the works O Guarani, Iracema and Ubirajara by José de Alencar. For this purpose, we draw from the theoretical framework of Onomastics (DICK, 1999), Contextual Fictional Etymology (AUTOR, 2018), Lexicology (BIDERMAN, 2001; VILELA, 1995) and Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004, 2009; AUTOR, 2014). To extract the Indianist anthroponyms, we used the WordSmith Tools software (SCOTT, 2012) and some resources of the Genre/Historical version of Corpus do Português (DAVIES, 2006). We considered as Alencar’s anthroponymic etymons the indigenous names created by the author in his works. Towards this end, two criteria were considered: first, the words should not be part of exclusion dictionaries, which publication predates Alencar's works; second, the words should appear in the Corpus do Português (DAVIES, 2006) as having its first occurrence in texts written by Alencar. The creation of anthroponymic etymons by Alencar enabled him to attribute to the indigenous characters not only a name, but also the physical and/or psychological features intended by the author. Therefore, from the perspective of Contextual Fictional Etymology, the study of Alencar’s anthroponymies also entails some knowledge about the language possibilities and the author’s creativity, by means of a lexicon that enabled the expression of his ideals.