English semantic calques in digital technologies and social media’s lexica in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This article aims to study English semantic calques in Brazilian Portuguese, especially those from the digital technologies and social media’s lexical field. To that end, a list of words was conceived, all being lexical units that occur with various aceptions in different contexts, and that appear with new meanings in the technology's field. Such usage can be associated with the English equivalents by bilingual speakers (Manzolillo, n.d.). The words are: “adicionar”, from to add; “algoritmo”, from algorithm; “baixar”, from to download; “compartilhar”, from to share; “conexão”, from connection; “curtir”, from to like; “endereço”, from address; “seguir”, from to follow; “servidor”, from server; “plataforma”, from platform; and “visualizar”, from to view. Moreover, a theoretical review focused on the concepts of borrowings, calques and neologisms was made, especially addressing the different types of calques and how the semantic one behaves. Each term also had its etymological origin and etymon studied, following the analysis of corpora. This contributed to deciding whether they could be classified as semantic calques or neologisms, as well as the formers´ terminus a quo datings. Out of the eleven words, seven were classified as semantic calques while four as semantic neologisms. This showcased that the majority of the technical computer aceptions can already be found in renowned Portuguese dictionaries. Moreover, occurrences were registered in both Anglophone and Brazilian corpora, all ranging from 1990 to 1994. It was, then, possible to connect Brazil’s current globalized scenario and the development of English as a Lingua Franca (Jenkins, 2007) to the adoption of calques in Brazilian Portuguese.