Raído (Mar 2017)
A lexicologic study from a socio-historical basis of the lexical forms “asylum for the elderly” and “nursing home”
Abstract
On the assumption that language constitutes a social and historical phenomenon, this study aims to analyze through a social and historical approach of the lexis, the lexical forms “homes for elderly” and “retirement home”. The corpora in which we aim to analyze are composed of 20 texts and 46 respectively, available at an online acquis of Jornal do Brasil — RJ. The period of analysis chosen for this paper corresponds to the beginning of the twentieth century, between 1900 and 2005. Based on Cambraia’s (2013) theoretical and methodological foundations, this work intends to analyze the texts included in two synchronic cuts: from 1901 up to 2005, in which we discuss the occurrence of the competitor forms “home for elderly” and “retirement home”, verifying in which extent they appear in an opposite frequency standard, as well as analyzing the intralinguistic and extralinguistic aspects that contributed in order to have speakers using a new word to an existent one. This way, we can realize that the lexical change occurred and one of the main reasons for that were important extralinguistic aspects, such as the creation of Geriatrics as a medical specialty and scientific knowledge.
