Os termos da meliponicultura: uma abordagem socioterminológica

Abstract

This dissertation presents a printed and an electronic version of an illustrated glossary of Meliponiculture, the beekeeping of stingless bees, developed within the theoretical principles of Socioterminology. The corpus was composed of 197 texts belonging to different genres, such as books, scientific papers, newsletters, brochures, dissertations and theses, popular articles, booklets, articles written by beekeepers, papers presented in congresses, documents published on the Internet and slide presentations. The main goal was to describe the terms in use within the field of Meliponiculture, as well as their associated variations. The WordSmith Tools software was used to extract and process automatically the overall data and helped to build the potential lexical items of the glossary. The freeware LexiquePro was also adopted to organize the terminological units. The glossary is divided into 9 main semantic fields and 18 subfields. There is a sum total of 523 lexical entries, 177 of which are variants and 147 are illustrated. Both the printed and the eletronic versions are organized alphabetically. In addition to that, the eletronic version of the glossary offers a system of analogic search, based on semantic fields. The choice of a subject on Meliponiculture is justified by the fact that this activity is booming, not only in Brazil but all over the world and, particularly, because of the socioeconomic impact that it represents for the State of Pará, Brazil, by its alignment with the concepts of diversification and sustainable usage of land in the Amazon. Developing a socioterminological product about Meliponiculture and making it available to community represents, above all, the important role of terminology research in organizing and disseminating knowledge, in order to facilitate the communication among those interested in this activity, including beekeepers, researchers, professors and students. Although this study focuses on written data, it assumes the premise that language must be analyzed in its real context, since it cannot be understood as a phenomenon apart from its extralinguistic variables such as context and users.