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Part of
Cultural Keywords in Discourse
Edited by Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 277] 2017
► pp. 157–182

Chapter 7
Subúrbio and suburbanos

Two cultural keywords in Brazilian discourse

| Aarhus University

This chapter studies the Brazilian Portuguese keywords subúrbio ‘suburb’ and suburbanos ‘suburb dwellers’. Despite formal similarities, the English cityscape word suburb conveys a very different concept than subúrbio. In dictionaries, the cultural semantics of the words subúrbio ‘suburb’ and suburbanos ‘suburb dwellers’ is largely missing. This is unfortunate since the semantic richness of these words shed light on Brazilian discourses of urbanism and on a culturally-specific way of categorising people in the urban space. Using evidence from a range of different Brazilian discourses and speakers’ reflections on the two words, I propose a semantic explication for each, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to adequately account for the complex and cultural meaning of the words – seen from an insider’s perspective.

Keywords: Brazilian Portuguese, social categories, cityscape terms, subúrbio , suburbanos
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Social categorisation and cityscape terms
  • 3. Subúrbio and suburbanos in Brazilian discourse
    • 3.1Dictionaries
    • 3.2Speakers’ reflections
    • 3.3 Subúrbio in musical discourse
    • 3.4Sayings
  • 4.Semantic explications
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.277.07mat
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