Meaning and context: relations between language and culture in Renaissance stitch

Abstract

Semantics, according to Ferrarezi Júnior (2010), has gained notoriety since the 1980s as a field of study. It’s been just a few decades since the scholars have realized the importance of hitching such studies to the cultural aspects. It’s in this conjuncture that the present approach of the lexical choices from a group of speakers (lace women) specifically in the city of Monteiro-PB is inserted. This city develops a handicraft form named Renaissance Lace, and then allows us to reflect about the possibility of hitching to the sociocultural context where they live, by the process of naming stitches. Therefore, this search aimed at observing how these lace-makers take ownership of this vocabulary, which is used to name the sewing stitches and if they can establish connections between the vocabulary and their everyday life. In this research, we noticed that there is a relation between the lace-makers context and the sewing stitches’ nomenclature, evidenced through the names pronounced in their daily routine. However, this relation is realized by the lace-makers to such aspects only when reflections upon them are raised.