Lexical convergence and divergence in Portuguese 53Another interesting question is to know what happens when other types of
calculations are used instead. The results of four alternative calculations are
the following:
― when we separate golo/gol and chuto/chute, the result points towards a
stable situation:
U’(P50,B50) 42.16% ≅ U’(P70,B70) 43.42% ≅ U’(P00,B00) 43.83%
― when GOAL 1 is excluded from the calculation, the result remains iden-
tical to the first one, i.e. convergence between 1950 and 1970:
U’(P50,B50) 43.81% < U’(P70,B70) 49.33% ≅ U’(P00,B00) 50.97%
― when all the phonetic and graphic variants are taken into consideration
together as one term in the calculation, i.e. penalty/penalty/pênalti as
one term, and goal/gol(o) as another term, the result still suggests con-
vergence between the 1950s and the 1970s for U’:
U’(P50,B50) 48.09% < U’(P70,B70) 56.22% ≅ U’(P00,B00) 57.61%
― excluding the most asymmetric profiles, i.e. the more frequent profiles
(MATCH, TEAM and GOAL 1 ) and the less frequent ones (OFFSIDE and
DRIBBLING), the result shows a stable situation:
U’(P50,B50) 40.82% ≅ U’(P70,B70) 43.53% ≅ U’(P00,B00) 44.24%
Some problems arise from the above results. The first alternative calcula-
tion suggests that the profile GOAL 1 – which is the third most frequent pro-
file and represents 13% on average of the overall quotations (see Table 4) –
is responsible for modifying the results. A similar stable situation is evi-
denced by the result of the last alternative calculation. This means that the
inclusion or exclusion of a variant or of a single concept may change the
picture entirely, which may pose some problems, particularly since the
studied concepts were picked by hand and do not represent the entire lexi-
cal field. However, the remainder of the calculations still indicates conver-
gence between 1950 and 1970. (Interestingly, the result is the same whether
or not the phonetic and graphic variants are separated). Furthermore, the
concepts studied are representative of the lexical field of football and there
is a balance between the more frequent and the less frequent concepts.
The question of the preference for the weighted measure may be more
problematic. Given the alternative calculations, we might in fact question
whether the unweighted measure is not being given less attention than it
may actually deserve. We reiterate that, for the present study, the pragmatic
perspective (which integrates the differences in frequency of the concepts
studied) is more important than the structural perspective (which attributes
the same weight equally to every concept). Furthermore, it was observed