Parliamentary names as a strategy for social positioning and manifesting identity traits

Abstract

Drawing on the theoretical presuppositions of socio-onomastics, the present study provides an analysis of the parliamentary names adopted by state and district legislators elected in Brazil. A Brazilian parliamentary name is an anthroponym chosen by individuals elected for a legislative position to be used in official acts and documents of their respective legislative houses. The corpus is comprised of 1,157 names of representatives from the 27 federative units elected for the 2019–2023 term. When observing the relationship between the parliamentary names and the rules of the house for their composition, the analysis shows that, among the legislative houses that have norms on the issue, the chosen anthroponyms abide by the rules in only half of them. When the parliamentary names are compared to their respective civil names and ballot names, the results show that, although most of the politicians retain parliamentary names linked to elements from their civil name, a considerable number of them employ creative resources in order to hold variant forms, enabling them to have identity features of group membership or associated with the political realm.