42 Augusto Soares da Silva
cal stratification in both varieties so as to evaluate whether distance be-
tween the standard and substandard strata is greater in BP or EP.
Among the hypotheses about the relationships between EP and BP, it is
conjectured (i) that there is an increasing influence of BP on EP (and Afri-
can varieties) as a result of the popularity of Brazilian soap operas and
football, as well as Brazilian emigration; (ii) that BP is more receptive to
loanwords; (iii) that there is a greater distance between formal and informal
registers in BP than in EP; and (iv) that despite the lack of clear hypotheses
stated in the literature, a progressive and inevitable fragmentation of the
Portuguese language is taking place (i.e. the hypothesis of divergence).
The present investigation is concerned with onomasiological variation
involving denotational synonyms. The empirical background consists of
several thousand observations of the use of alternative terms that designate
43 nominal concepts from the lexical fields of football and clothing. This
corpus-based onomasiological investigation follows up on the original so-
ciolectometrical and sociolexicological study that Geeraerts, Grondelaers
and Speelman (1999) performed for Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. Simi-
lar to Geeraerts et al. (1999), this research is based on a cognitive sociolin-
guistics perspective (Geeraerts 2005; Kristiansen and Dirven 2008), an
emerging area in Cognitive Linguistics which is committed to the study of
the relationship between cognition and language-internal diversity, in other
words “lectal” variation.
This paper is divided into six sections. Following this introduction, the
second section provides the essential elements of the theoretical and me-
thodological framework of this cognitive and quantitative sociolexicologi-
cal study of the Portuguese language. The third and fourth sections present
uniformity results and item/concept-related results respectively. Special
emphasis is placed on the mutual impact of uniformity and item-related
features. Additionally, the fifth section gives some insights into the ques-
tion of stratification. The conclusions and topics for further research are
given in the last section. In this way, we hope to contribute to the develop-
ment of Portuguese sociolinguistics and particularly to the issue of conver-
gence and divergence between the European and Brazilian varieties of the
language (see Soares da Silva 2005, 2008a).