Surveys in toponymy in Brazil: works produced in postgraduate stricto sensu

Abstract

This article aims to present a general survey of dissertations and theses produced in the context of several stricto sensu postgraduate programs from Brazilian universities with themes focused on toponymy research. The time frame established for the survey was the period from 1980 to January 2020 and the method used for data collection was the Simple Search for the Lattes Curriculum (CNPq, n.d.). The research resulted in a total of 142 works already completed and defended. It was possible to verify, through the analysis of the data, that the most prominent universities with regard to the quantity of works produced in the area in question are the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), a Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMS) e a Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS). The analysis of the titles also allowed to observe that the researchers have opted for different excerpts for their research, such as, for example, focus on the type of semantic motivation of the designatives, on the relations between toponymy and history, on the linguistic origin of the toponyms, on the making of atlases, glossaries and toponyms dictionaries, among others; in addition, the survey shows that the relationship between toponymy research and teaching has been a focus of interest for some researchers in recent years.