12 Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves Peirsman
such as salience and vagueness have a marked effect on lexical hetero-
geneity and that an examination of dialectological lexical heterogeneity
purely from the point of view of geographic differentiation is too restric-
tive.
In the second contribution in this section, entitled “Measuring and pa-
rameterizing lexical convergence and divergence between European and
Brazilian Portuguese” Augusto Soares da Silva reports on a corpus-based
study into the lexical relationship between European Portuguese and Bra-
zilian Portuguese. In order to assess the degree of lexical divergence and
convergence between the two varieties in the course of the last 60 years and
throw light on the influence of internal linguistic parameters, Soares im-
plements quantitative methods designed to measure the onomasiological
profile (set of alternative synonymous terms used to designate a concept
together with their frequencies) and uniformity (similarity between the pro-
files of different varieties). The analysis was carried out for several thou-
sand observations of the use of alternative terms designating 43 nominal
concepts, gathered from large corpora: 21 sets of synonymous terms from
the lexical field of football and 22 profiles of clothing items. The author
concludes that both varieties diverge from each other in the vocabulary of
clothing, that the Brazilian variety has changed more than the European
variety and that the actual distance between the standard and the substan-
dard strata is higher in Brazilian Portuguese than in European Portuguese.
In “Awesome insights into semantic variation”, Justyna A. Robinson
observes that in sociolinguistics few methods have been designed to deal
with social variation of meaning and that in cognitive semantics claims are
often made at an abstract level. Addressing the question whether variation-
ist sociolinguistics can provide insights into the conceptual structure of
polysemy and whether cognitive semantics can be of use for sociolinguis-
tics, Robinson combines cognitive and sociolinguistic analytical methods in
order to examine the flexibility of a polysemous category within the same
speech community. In her study, semasiological variants of the adjective
awesome were elicited in 72 one-to-one interviews and subjected to a cog-
nitive semantics analysis. As a second step, the various senses of awesome
were related to the sociolinguistic variables of age, gender, education, oc-
cupation and place of residence and subjected to a logistic regression analy-
sis. Robinson concludes by highlighting the potential benefits of employing
a socio-cognitive method: by mapping individual conceptualizations of a
polysemous category onto a variationist context, a dynamic picture of se-
mantic change in progress emerges.