From -landia to -olândia: a morphosemantic approach to the X-lândia constructions in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

In this paper, the morfo-semantics statute of the lexical formations ending in -land in Portuguese is described: their formal characteristics and their extensions of meaning operated over time. To represent the relevant phonological and morphological aspects of these formations, we apply the Booij model (2005, 2010), called Construction Morphology. In turn, the semantic-cognitive aspects of X-(o)lândia are addressed by means of Fauconnier & Turner’s (2002) Conceptual Blending Theory. We intend to show which cognitive domains are involved and how blending occurs. To this, we have a corpus consisting of 114 words, extracted mainly from electronic dictionaries, such as Aurélio and Houaiss. We try to show that the new formations differ from the older ones not only by the frontier vowel -o- (see ‘Ceilândia’ vc. ‘Cracolândia’), but above all because they activate a frame that allows naming places of agglomeration, such as ‘macacolândia’ (‘place full of black people’) and ‘macholândia’ (‘meeting place of heterosexual males for fun and leisure’). In the case of the onyonyms, such as ‘sushilândia’ (‘oriental food restaurant’), the blending is made by completion, while in the X-olandia formations it is made by elaboration. The main difference between these last two recent uses is the expression of point of view, since X-olândia refers to forms almost always evaluated negatively by the conceptualizer: they are not circumscribed places, being perceived as areas with a large contingent of elements depreciated by the speaker.

Keywords

• Morphology
• semantics
• mental spaces