Lexical convergence and divergence in Portuguese 79
Brazilian variety does not appear to occur with its counterpart as reference
point. Naturally, the differences in the lexical convergence/divergence
process between Portuguese and Dutch reflect the geographical and soci-
ocultural and historical differences of these pluricentric languages, which
are clearly stronger and more complex in Portuguese than in Dutch.
Notes
- This study is part of the “Convergence and Divergence in the Portuguese
Lexicon” research project, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science
and Technology (POCTI/LIN/48575/2002) in the framework of the POCTI of
the European Communitarian Fund FEDER. I would like to thank three
anonymous reviewers for their thorough and illuminating comments. I would
also like to thank Stefan Grondelaers, Dirk Speelman, Dirk Geeraerts and
Yves Peirsman for their methodological support and their useful comments
and suggestions during the various stages of this project.
- The two lists of terms presented in the appendix were based on Portuguese
reference dictionaries, football glossaries, Feijó’s studies (1994, 1998) on the
language of football, Farias’ (2003) fashion glossary and also on the content
of the corpus which was built for this study. Loanwords that keep their origi-
nal form are indicated in inverted commas.
- Due to space limitations, the results of the total number of the terms studied
(183 football terms and 264 clothing terms) cannot be presented here.
- The p value indicates whether the relationship under analysis is statistically
relevant: statistically, a relationship is significant only if p is lower than 0.05
(a value between 0.05 and 0.10 can be viewed as indicative of a trend). And
the r^2 value indicates the percentage of data explained by a particular variable.
References
Bagno, Marcos
2001 Português ou Brasileiro? Um convite à pesquisa. São Paulo:
Parábola Editorial.
Belard, Francisco
2001 Brasil e Portugal. Jornal Expresso, May 5 2001, Cartaz, 66.
Brandão, Sílvia Figueiredo, and Maria Antónia Mota (eds.)
2003 Análise Contrastiva de Variedades do Português. Primeiros
Estudos. Rio de Janeiro: In-Fólio.
