Linguistic taboos in the religious lexikon: a geolinguistic study based on Brazil’s linguistic atlas

Abstract

The study seeks to describe and analyze the denominations used by speakers of the capitals of Brazil to name the lexical item “devil”. For this, surveys of the Atlas Linguistic Project of Brazil (ALiB) were used, carried out with 200 informants, distributed equally by both sexes, in two age groups and two levels of education, selected according to the criteria of Contemporary Dialectology. Based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Pluridimensional Geolinguistics, the first question of the Semantic-Lexical Questionnaire regarding the semantic area of religion and beliefs was analyzed, in order to document the synonymic richness for the devil variant. The data was collected through the question: “God is in heaven and in hell is ...?”. 506 lexical data were recorded, realized through 39 variants: angel of evil, evil angel, antichrist, beast, beast-beast, beetle, ugly animal, bad animal, dog, devil, capirot, horned, thing, bad thing, cramulhano, creature, cross-creed, demo, demon, disgrace, devil, didi, grimy, sulfur, red star, enemy, lucifer, evil, mephitic, prince of the heavens, rabudo, sapirico, satan, satangoso, satan, dirty, tibinga, tinhoso , change. The semantic-lexical analysis revealed a correspondence between the substitute linguistic resources of the devil referent and the linguistic taboos, registered through metaphorical, euphemistic and dysphemistic processes.