46 Augusto Soares da Silva
SUIT M, SUIT/OUTFIT F, TAILORED JACKET M/F, TROUSERS M/F, T-SHIRT
M/F.
The quantitative methods used to measure convergence and divergence
as well as other types of distances between EP and BP are uniformity (U)
measures and featural (A) measures. Both were developed by Geeraerts,
Grondelaers, and Speelman (1999). The U measure or “profile-based lin-
guistic uniformity” (Geeraerts 2001; Speelman, Grondelaers, and Geeraerts
2003) is a basic measurement which involves the notions of (formal ono-
masiological) profile and uniformity. The onomasiological profile of a con-
cept in a particular language variety is the set of alternative synonymous
terms used to designate that concept in that language variety, together with
their frequencies. Uniformity is a measure for the similarity between the
profiles in the different language varieties. For instance, uniformity be-
tween two samples of data is obtained as follows: if term A occurs 6 times
and term B occurs 4 times in one of the samples, and term A occurs 3 times
and term B occurs 7 times in the other sample, the number of common pairs
that name this concept (7 pairs) constitutes a uniformity of 70%. This result
is obtained by making the sum of the lowest relative frequencies of each
alternative term: 30% of term A (3 uses, coming from the second sample)
and 40% of term B (4 uses, coming from the second sample).
Technically, the uniformity for a concept can be calculated with the fol-
lowing formula (see Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman 1999: 36-64 for
further details on the formulae presented in this section):
The uniformity U for a concept Z between two samples Y 1 and Y 2 equals
the sum of the minima of relative frequencies F of the lexical item x in the
onomasiological profiles for Z in Y 1 and Y 2.
If we wish to investigate more than one concept at a time, uniformity U
is defined as the average of uniformity ratings obtained for isolated con-
cepts, whereas uniformity U’ is defined as the weighted average of the
relative frequency of each concept in the researched samples. The weighted
uniformity U’ is calculated as follows:
∑
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