Representações do ser humano no Google Books: uma perspectiva da Linguística de Corpus sobre os estágios da vida

• Ano de defesa: 2019
• Autor(a) principal: Dias, Bárbara Soares da Silva
• Orientador(a): Sardinha, Antonio Paulo Berber
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Linguística Aplicada e Estudos da Linguagem
• Departamento: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Linguística de corpus; Google Books; Representação social
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Corpus linguistics; Social representation; Sentiment analysis
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA::LINGUISTICA APLICADA
• Link de acesso: https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/22524

The present work was motivated by the need to understand social representations of human being in different phases of life. The life phases were performed through the following lexical items: man, woman, adolescent, adolescence, adult, boy, girl, child, elderly, kid, teen and teenager (as well as their plural forms). The data from the analysis consisted of the publications made available by Google Books in the period from 1800 to 2008 (i.e., 208 years), amounting to about half a trillion words. For this purpose, several analyses of the ngrams (sequences of adjacent words), formed by these words in the Google Books Ngrams database, were performed. The research is based on Corpus Linguistics, which allowed us to verify the patterns of use of these words as well as their usage variation over time. The study included, first, quantitative and then qualitative analysis, through the interpretation of the theme pointed out by the lexicon and affected by the reading and analysis of texts made available by the Google Books database. By analyzing the patterns and the temporal variation of use, the emerging representations of each investigated item were identified. Based on this analysis, it was possible to detect the introduction, presence and duration of the representations, and it was possible to verify how human beings have been represented by language (in English) in the last three centuries. In addition to the obtained results, this research highlights the power of historical analysis based on large amounts of textual data (big data)