Violence: a categorization of men and women from Ceará

Abstract

Violence can be considered one of the most elusive and difficult concepts to be defined within the social sciences and perceive themselves little discussion from the point of view of language. In our work, we find the way of structuring the category VIOLENCE, as well as the scales of prototypicality from specimens mentioned by men and women of Ceará. Thus, based on the Theory of Categorization Rosch (1970) and Theory of prototypes Lakoff (1987), had the objective of determining if there were significant differences between the scales of category prototypicality that had been identified in two distinct groups: of men and women Ceará. We adopt, as a theoretical, postulates Rosch, Gray and Boyes-Braem (1976a), Lakoff (1987), Eysenck and Keane (1994), Medin and Ross (1996), Jacob and Shaw (1998) among others. We note that the specimens cited by women and men, in the questionnaires to define the category VIOLENCE if presented differently, confirming one of our hypotheses: the man Ceará is considered "goat plague", macho man, which makes more evident the physical than psychological. The results revealed that while the group of men the most salient example was the submodel metonymic PHYSICAL FORCE, the females had specimens that were included on submodel metonymic PSYCHOLOGICAL FORCE.