The concept of crisis and denominations: types and causes of variations in the world economy crisis terminology

Abstract

This paper aims at introducing the concept of crisis in the economic scope, its denominations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Spanish (ES), concluding with its denominative variants in both languages, such as: economy crisis, 2008 crisis, major crisis and major globalization crisis; crisis económica, crisis de 2008, gran crisis e gran crisis de la globalización, respectively, searching to identify the types and causes of these variations. These variants, as fragments, already proposed by Freixa (2014), present the following types: morph syntax variations which are related to an inferior lexicon character, being either by alteration in its syntagmatic structure or by maintenance or change of gender or number; lexicon – may be considered the synonymy itself, since there is total change between both lexical units which will produce the same meaning. Among the causes already proposed by the author (Freixa, 2014), only the following causes will be considered: the functional one, which is constituted by different communicative registers; the stylist icon, which is related to the author’s communicative options and needs. The types and causes of variations will be in traduced, exemplified and analyzed according to the contexts collected from the Brazilian and Spanish corpora, which integrates the Project Valores culturais e didáticos na metáfora de especialidade: as múltiplas imagens da crise econômica mundial na imprensa escrita (Cultural and Didactic Values in the specialty metaphor: multiple images of the world economy crisis in the written midia) – an integrated research Project by USP – University of São Paulo, UEM – State University of Maringa, Unesp and University of Vigo, funded by CAPES/DGPU. As a conclusion, it was observed that the search for denominative variants has been relevant to introduce an in vivo terminology because the case of economical crisis concept and its denominations shows that variations found may go beyond the univocality.