Gender expression and construction of female surnames in the portuguese language at the end of the 19th century

Abstract

The present work aimed, based on a historical rescue, to investigate the occurrence of gender expression in surnames found in Brazilian and Portuguese documents from the late 19th century, alluding to Portuguese immigration in Brazil. The research was inscribed in the terms of Onomastics, a linguistic science that is dedicated to the study of proper names, more specifically Anthroponymy, a branch that deals with the names of people. Based on the theoretical principles of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff, 1987; Silva, 2008), the analysis focused on dated corpora, namely: a) enrollment records filled out by immigrants between 1887 and 1889. These immigrants stayed to the “Hospedaria de Imigrantes do Brás”, considered the largest Brazilian hostel; and b) passports of the Portuguese who migrated to Brazil between 1888 and 1890. This documentation belongs to the Archive of the University of Coimbra, referring to the Civil Government Fund. By investigating these corpora, it was possible to underline the existence of surnames marked by the expression of the female gender, which justified the interest in discovering the probable motivations associated with this phenomenon. The result, based on data analysis, indicated that the sampling in numerical terms was negligible, which can be explained by several reasons suggested in the specific literature of the area. This study also results in the contribution it provides to the theme - still little explored – by proposing a well-founded collection of explanatory hypotheses put forward in previous works.