A Study of the Lexical Fields of Indians and Blacks in Colonial Portuguese

The book "Um Estudo dos Campos Léxicos do Índio e do Negro no Português Colonial: uma Análise na Perspectiva Léxico-Semântica" (A Study of the Lexical Fields of the Indian and the Negro in Colonial Portuguese: an Analysis from a Lexical-Semantic Perspective) is the result of research that aimed to analyze the extent to which the lexicon recorded in texts produced in colonial Brazil reflects the image of the Indian and the Negro conveyed by colonial society. The aim was to verify the extent to which certain lexical units reflect aspects of the administration, the economy, the politics of invasions, customs, religion, in short, the culture related to blacks and Indians at this stage in Brazil's history, in other words, to analyze the relationship between lexicon and culture and its manifestation in the vocabulary used during this period in Brazil's history. The selection of the semantic areas investigated was based on the following criteria: the importance of the culture and language of indigenous and African peoples in the ethnic and linguistic formation of colonial Brazil, the social role of these peoples in society and the consequent way in which they were treated by the colonizers in the first centuries of Brazil's colonization.