Os nomes das escolas da cidade de Bento Gonçalves : uma perspectiva onomástico-cultural

Abstract

This dissertation proposes an investigation of the names of public and private elementary and high schools of the city of Bento Gonçalves (RS) under the perspective of toponymic studies. Toponymy is the area of Onomastics responsible for the analysis of place names. The general goal is investigating the linguistic origin and the historical and cultural importance of naming a school, also verifying how linguistic, historic, cultural, identity, regional and ideological factors of a given society may influence the choice of the names. From the corpus of forty-seven public and private elementary and high schools of the city of Bento Gonçalves, the toponymic motivation of each name is researched in documental and historical sources. The information is recorded on cards, according to a lexicographic-toponymic model proposed by Dick (1990). By observing and examining the characteristics of every toponym, a qualitative analysis is realized, and the names are classified according to the taxonomy proposed by Dick (1990), along with the processing of names as per motivation, creation date, gender and profession of the person honored with the name of the school, and changes that occurred along time. The study reveals that there are naming tendencies according to every period of time, and that such tendencies are influenced by linguistic, cultural, identity and ideological aspects experienced by the community in the moment that the names are chosen. Therefore the names preserve and transmit such features. The study also reveals that these names may either result from legal imposition or were demanded by the community, but the persistence or change of a toponym is determined by the meanings that the community builds upon it. So, this investigation presents a contribution to toponymic studies of the Italian Immigration Region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.