Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

(Dana P.) #1
Lexical convergence and divergence in Portuguese 45

from (ii) and (iii) shed light on the question of stratification. All the materi-
al from (i) and (iii) was manually extracted. Data referring to the Brazilian
variety was collected from the two largest cities in the country, namely São
Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
The sub-corpus of football contains 2.7 million tokens selected from 8
newspapers (4 Portuguese and 4 Brazilian newspapers) and 15 million to-
kens collected from Internet chats. The sub-corpus of clothing extends to
1.2 million tokens gathered from 24 fashion magazines (14 Portuguese and
14 Brazilian magazines) and 1,300 pictures of labels and price tags photo-
graphed from clothes shop windows. These two sub-corpora make up the
CONDIVport corpus, which is still under construction (Soares da Silva
2008b). This corpus is structured according to geographical, diachronic and
stylistic variables and has, at present, an extension of 4 million tokens from
the formal register (used in sports newspapers and fashion magazines) and
15 million tokens from the informal register (of Internet football chats and
clothes labels). The CONDIVport corpus is partly available on the Lingua-
teca website http://www.linguateca.pt/ACDC (a distributed resource center for
language technology for Portuguese; Santos and Sarmento 2003, Santos
2009).
The analysis was carried out for 21 sets of synonymous terms (or ono-
masiological profiles) from the lexical field of football, which means that a
total number of 183 terms were studied in a database containing 90,202
observations of these terms used in sports newspapers and 143,946 obser-
vations of their use in Internet chats. The analysis is also comprised of 22
onomasiological profiles of clothing items for men (M) and women (F),
which means that 264 terms were studied in a database compiling 12,451
observations of their use in fashion magazines and 3,240 observations of
their use in labels and price tags pictured from clothes shops. All the pro-
files including their denotational synonyms are listed in the appendix
(terms with a strong popular mark were excluded to avoid inflating differ-
ences).^2 The name of each profile is translated into English. The profiles for
football are: BACK, BALL, COACH, CORNER, DRIBBLING, FORWARD, FOUL,
FREE KICK, GOAL 1 , GOAL 2 , GOALKEEPER, MATCH, MIDFIELDER, OFFSIDE,
PENALTY, REFEREE, ASSISTANT REFEREE, SHOT/KICK, SHOT/PLAYING,
TEAM, WINGER. The profiles for clothing are: BLOUSE F, CARDIGAN M/F,
COAT F, COAT M, DRESS F, JACKET M/F, JACKET (BLOUSON) M/F, JEANS
M/F, JUMPER M/F, LEGGINGS F, OVERCOAT M/F, RAINCOAT M/F, SHIRT
M, SHORT JACKET F, SHORT JACKET M, SHORT TROUSERS M/F, SKIRT F,

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