Adriana Lima

Freguesia is a generic that refers to one administrative division which involves social contexts, primarily in the
scope of Portugal’s official (Catholic) church. The term had the same meaning in Brazil during Portuguese
colonization. These countries have the same language, but their administrative divisions, history and culture are
different. They also have some generics with the same linguistic structure as the aforementioned generic, which
reflects linguistic phenomena today related to key changes in social structures. This paper will provide support
for understanding the meaning of this concept and data for the Atlas Toponímico de Portugal (Toponymic Atlas
of Portugal) developed at Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil), showing the use of freguesia as a generic term in
São Paulo (Brazil) and in Braga (Portugal). Although the focus is not directly on Braga in this paper, interest in
it is justified because the Master’s level research we are carrying out examines the role of the freguesia and its
related toponyms in Braga, a city that is evidently important to established Portuguese nationality. These names
can display the semantic status of a term that has been in existence since Portugal’s inception, as well as its
social and historical changes and diachronic transformations, which may contribute to understanding the
colonization process in Brazil from another perspective, by analyzing the linguistic status of freguesia in São
Paulo in the present day.

Because the study of toponyms is a resource for understanding the linguistic traits and also the man who gave the name, this study was conceived to make contributions related to the aspects of the physical and cultural means in which these names were created, becoming part of the Portugal Toponymic Atlas (Projeto Atlas Toponímico de Portugal ATPor). Thus, this dissertation aims to verify which semantic feature are present at toponyms of the municipality of Braga, Portugal, recovering transparent and opaque motivations involving such denominations as well as analyzing structurally the place names in the aforementioned municipality. Based on Dick's work on the scientific theory and analysis of toponyms in their semantic variants in Brazil (begun in 1980) and on the application of these concepts by Carvalhinhos to toponyms in Portugal (starting in 1998), we gathered historical and linguistic records regarding particular issues in Toponymy and, by extension, Onomastics as the science of names, in order to determine the motivational profile of place names in Braga. The constitution of the corpus and the methodology were based on toponymic Atlas' production parameters, making it possible to systematize and quantify data to describe the local toponymy. Among the four-hundred and fortythree toponyms analyzed, four-hundred and nineteen were classified in toponymic taxonomies, indicating a motivational pattern for the dynamic of naming geographic entities in Braga municipality. Toponymic retrieval allowed to find out names related to the pre-Roman period and, especially, medieval times to be found, providing evidence of aspects of the physical context and social themes that regard the V to XII centuries. On the one hand, many place names originating from a place's physical nature reflect the geomorphology, vegetation and mineral makeup of the soil. On the other, medieval manners of demarcating property, displaying social facts and constituting human settlements are active in the anthropo-cultural origin of the majority of the surveyed toponyms analyzed. In this situation, we identified archaisms, showing continuing use of denominations at the location.

Changing street names are a constant for the inhabitants of São Paulo and for
the inhabitants of other major cities in Brazil in general. Within this context, we look at how
bridges, important concrete elements of spatial reference, are inserted in the urban
landscape; this paper is therefore aimed at verifying name changes made to bridges spanning
the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers in the municipality of São Paulo (Brazil), identifying the profile
of these actions. After surveying bridges whose official names had been changed, we then
collected official records. By identifying the taxonomic classification, in consideration of
studies done by Dick (1990), and documents found during a search of other records, data
analysis led us to a typology for describing the changes that had taken place. The changes
studied show us that manifestations of homages in toponyms given to bridges are established
through substitutions or juxtapositions that may or may not use hyphenation, indicating
naming modalities instituted in the cases assessed.