Toponímia dos primeiros municípios tocantinenses

• Autor(a) principal: Dias, Ana Lourdes Cardoso
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/5852
• topic: Onomástica; Toponímia; Léxico; História; Municípios tocantinenses; Onomastic; Toponym; Lexicon; Culture; History; Cities from Tocantins state; LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA

The toponym field, a sub-area of Onomastics, studies the names of places, their meanings and origins, the changes and motivations which influence the process of choosing those names. This study presents a toponym investigation regarding the first cities in the state of Tocantins, the ones that started and established themselves from gold mining in the 18th century. It also approaches the names of rivers – hydronymy – in the region due to the significance of them in the establishment of the cities. Since, in most cases, waterways are the first environmental elements named. Afterwards, their names become the identification of urban settlements by the riverside. This study aims to identify senses and motivations that influenced the process of naming these places. To that end, toponyms shaping this Onomastics system were described, analyzed and interpreted, observing that, because of their specific role in referencing and identifying things in a geographic space, they are not ordinary signs of language, they are instruments of ideological propagation at the same time. Hence, this investigation has gone beyond theoretical Linguistics, it employs an interdisciplinary viewpoint, in which there is an intersection among history, geography and other knowledge areas. Thus, we searched for a methodology that enables combining these areas as to treat the linguistic phenomenon. We have decided on using principles of Historic Linguistics with sociocultural traces, in the Onomastics method perspective and along with Wörter und Sachen (Words and Things), since they are both theories that approach semantics as related to history and culture. Data collection, which has been carried out through historiography written documents, sustained toponyms existence before and nowadays. These documents allowed a historical retreat of facts that encouraged the toponym choice and retrieve possible meanings. Aspects regarding beliefs, cultural values, ideologies, geographic features, and cognition were identified as the motivation when choosing the names of the first cities in Tocantins. These factors reflect themselves in the toponym linguistic structure, translating the dominant intentionality when naming places. Besides, toponym of the region observed preserve a world-view and an ideology of power perpetuation, mainly related to politics and religion, from the very beginning and with slight changes throughout the history. Therefore, it is a collective memory repository, because it records significant aspects of life in society, representing a valuable linguistic-cultural heritage.