50 Augusto Soares da Silva
score (1) is given to loanwords keeping their original form, and the lowest
score (0.25) to strongly adapted terms and loanwords’ translations. In Table
3, the English influence on the onomasiological profile GOAL 1 in the 1950s
is measured, based on the absolute (abs) and relative (rel) frequencies of the
alternative terms, the W value of the English loan, and the sum of the rela-
tive frequencies of the alternative terms weighted by the membership value
W (rel*W), i.e. A (P50) 31.8% and A (B50) 44.8%.
- External diachronic analysis: uniformity results
In this section, we will analyze the evolution of the two language varieties
from an external perspective, that is, the relation between EP and BP taking
each variety as a whole. The internal linguistic factors which may have
played a role in the global evolution of the two varieties will be discussed
in section 4.
Three questions need to be asked:
(1) Is there convergence or divergence between EP and BP?
(2) Does the convergent/divergent trend occur on both sides or mainly
in one of them?
(3) Is uniformity increasing or decreasing within each variety? Is in-
ternal uniformity greater in EP or BP?
Uniformity calculations U and U’ were used to answer question (1) and (2).
Convergence and divergence (question 1) are expressed through the in-
crease and decrease of U/U’ values, respectively. The convergent or diver-
gent evolution of one of the varieties towards the other (question 2) is ex-
pressed by greater changes of U/U’ values from a time period to another
and by higher or lower values of U/U’ in different time periods rather than
in a particular time period. Internal uniformity calculations I and I’ were
used to answer question (3): the increase of I/I’ is indicative of growing
internal homogeneity. As mentioned before, in principle, weighted meas-
ures (U’, I’) are more significant than unweighted ones (U, I) and a statisti-
cal difference below 5% is not treated as significant.
Table 4 presents the results of uniformity U and weighted uniformity U’
for each one of the 21 concepts/profiles of football for the Portuguese va-
riety of Portugal (P) and the Portuguese variety of Brazil (B) in the decades
of the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s-2000s; the column on the right shows the