Toponymy in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language): Formal and Semantic- Motivational Analysis of the Signs that Name the Cities of Acre

Naming spaces is a human act and reflects traces of the culture and social group to which the person who names a place belongs, either in spoken or sign languages. This article presents an analysis of the toponyms in Libras that name the cities of the state of Acre. The toponyms were stored in digital files proposed by Sousa and Quadros (2019), and analyzed regarding the structure of the toponym in Libras and the semantic-motivational aspects that influenced the person to name a place. The study follows Sousa's (2019) methodo logical proposal, which is an adaptation of Dick's (1990, 1992) studies to the linguistic-cultural specificities of the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). The results show that naming the cities of Acre is strongly influenced by the spoken language, Portuguese, since most of the signs show hand configurations referring to the letters of the place names in the Portuguese language in their phonomorphological structure. With regard to semantic-motivational aspects, the iconic mapping of most of the data shows the visual references that influence the production of the name signs of the cities.