Parasynonymy in Brazilian regional linguistic atlases

Abstract

This work tries to find, in the specialized literature, the answer to the question: do the lexical items of the Linguistic Atlas constitute parasynonymies? After reading various authors of the areas of semantics, semiotics, lexicology and lexicography, with different views of the theme, we came to the conclusion, agreeing with these authors, that the question of synonyms is a question of grade and variation that could be linguistic or extralinguistic, and that there is no perfect synonym, once the sememe of any lexical item totally covers the sememe of the other item. As for the corpus for the analysis, we used five Linguistic Regional Atlas of Brazil: Bahia, Minas Gerais, Paraíba, Sergipe and Paraná. For this analysis we worked with lexical items of some lexical maps of the semantic field “atmospheric phenomena”, the “human body” and “culture and living”, of the five Brazilian published Atlas. Answering to the initial question, of whether the lexical items of the Linguistics Atlas are parasynonymies, we are sure that each of them, although having the same generic semes, their specific and virtual semes cover different regional geographic realities, which constitute a subsystem marked by diatopic variation, since diastratic the features of social variation: age, gender and school level, have similar or identical characteristics, which contradicts the view of some authors from the area.