A contrastive analysis of bergoglisms in Pope Francis speech corpus

Abstract

In 2013, Jorge Bergoglio, from Argentina, was elected Pope of the Catholic Church of Rome. The interest in his captivating personality, in addition to be the first Pope of Latin America, has gained preponderance since then, arousing curiosity around the so-called bergoglisms ”“ speaks peculiarly of Pope Francis. The objective of the present work is to analyze the marks of Appraisal in the official papal discourses in Spanish language and in the respective translations into Portuguese. The Vatican's official website makes available, among other texts, the papal discourses translated into various languages. Thus, this work has compiled from this site the discourses made by Pope Francis in Spanish-speaking countries and their respective translations into Portuguese. From this corpus, with subsidies from Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004) and the tools of the WordSmith Tools 6.0 program (SCOTT, 2012), aspects of Appraisal were analyzed around the bergoglisms in both languages. For this, the theory of Appraisal (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005) guided the analyses, through the meanings of the subsystems of Attitude (Judgement, Affect and Appreciation). On the other hand, the neologisms were observed from the classification of Alves (1990). With this theoretical framework and a methodological framework inspired by Novodvorski (2008; 2013), in addition to the tools of Corpus Linguistics, this work analyzed the formation of papal neologisms and the marks of Appraisal printed by the Pope in these neological constructions (bergoglisms), comparing them with the translations into the Portuguese language. To achieve these purposes, in addition to the compilation of the study corpus, it was also appropriate to compile a support corpus, with journalistic articles about the Pope and, especially, about the bergoglisms mentioned. It is hoped that this research will contribute to the corpus-based Studies of Translation and Neology, more specifically from the perspective of the theory of Appraisal and the resources of Corpus Linguistics, since the procedures adopted in this study can also be replicated in other corpora. The theoretical-methodological combination and the choice of the Spanish/Portuguese parallel corpus have proved to be productive.