Neological Idioms of the 2000s

Abstract

For this post-doctoral research, Neologistic Idioms in the 2000s, the goal is to articulate the field of studies on neologisms, from the research group of CNPq (The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) "TermNeo Project: Centre for Scientific and Technical Neologisms of Contemporary Portuguese", led by our future supervisor, Prof. Dr. Ieda Maria Alves, with the research we conducted earlier on idioms, in lexicology and lexicography fields, and continue to contribute to the CNPq group which we are part of, "Contrastive Lexicology and Lexicography", led by our former advisor, Prof. Dr. Claudia Maria Xatara. This way, we will raise the idioms that have emerged in Brazil between 2000 and 2009 in the journalistic corpus that feeds the base of Neologisms in Brazilian Portuguese. The Base, which meets the general goal of collecting and analyzing the neology of contemporary Brazilian Portuguese through a journalistic corpus, provides support to study the evolution of the Portuguese lexicon in its Brazilian variant. The journalistic corpus that feeds the base consists of the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and O Globo, and magazines Epoca, Isto é, e Veja, analyzed from January 1993 on. Our choice is to develop a research that presents the idioms from Brazilian Portuguese language whose genesis goes back to the 2000s, that means, by observing the Base, we will collect the idioms that were first used in our country during the period corresponding to the first decade of the XXI century, in a lexical work that aims to trace the emergence of new idioms in our language and its degree of lexicalization in respect to their constituent parts (variability) and connotative meaning (metaphor to which they referred to). This project really is an important resource for better understanding the idioms, one of the most effective and illustrative devices generated by subjectivity, creativity and cultural heritage of man, revealing the identity of its own people, an interface between lexicon and culture, inseparable in practice. Moreover, the idioms withstand time, making interactions between people in the portrait of a historical moment, which leads to a meeting between semantics and pragmatics.