Internationalization in the state universities of Paraná: a study on parasyonymy in institutional documents

Abstract

The internationalization of higher education, a reflection of globalization, is a growing phenomenon that seeks to integrate universities into the global landscape, driving cultural, technological, and scientific development. In Paraná, seven state universities stand out by forming partnerships, expanding their international presence, and promoting the Portuguese language as a bridge between institutions in different countries. Thus, this study aims to compare the meanings of the verbs incentivar (to encourage), promover (to promote), and impulsionar (to boost) in institutional internationalization documents – referred to as Plan and Policy – in order to identify possible relations of synonymy or parasynonymy. Internationalization has been discussed by theorists such as Knight (2020), Santos and Almeida Filho (2012), and Stallivieri (2017), in addition to research conducted in the Graduate Program in Languages at Unioeste by Salles (2020) and Stemposki Filho (2023). Due to the terminological bias of the research, we will rely on works by Barbosa et al. (2001), Biderman (2001), Krieger and Finatto (2023), among others. The methodology adopted is qualitative and descriptive, based on Corpus Linguistics (Baker, 1995; Berber Sardinha, 2004; Berber Sardinha; Resende; Shimazumi, 2023), aligned with the assumptions of the Communicative Theory of Terminology (Cabré, 1999). The results indicate that, although the analyzed verbs share similar meanings, they are parasynonyms, that is, their use depends on the context in which they appear.