The lexical ambiguity and budget crisis of Brazil

Abstract

Since the beginning, the Accounting aimed to generate useful information that reduces uncertainty and increases the level of assertiveness of decisions of users managers of their reports in the communication process of accounting and administrative facts. Countless studies have been published in order to show accounting as a reliable and secure information system. Few, however, are those who debate and cling to the problem of understanding of the terms and expressions used either by the professional or the internal or external-use customer. Given this scenario, the main objectives of this article are bringing to the debate the question of lexical ambiguity as regards the terminology used in the accounting reports, in particular, draw attention to some semantic aspects that can distort the meaning of information in the moment when the user needs to make a managerial decision. In this sense, it was presented a theoretical study about the budget proposal sent to the National Congress by presidency of the republic in order to clarify some obscure points which hovers at the time of interpretation of the terminology used, especially confronting the meanings used in business accounting in order to present the occurrence of lexical ambiguity represented by homonymy and polysemy. Despite the subject seems to have a technical purpose, we worked only the conceptual aspects in order to facilitate understanding by all readers, whether specialists in the field or not.