54 Augusto Soares da Silva
that the low frequency of OFFSIDE and DRIBBLING, for instance, is due to
the low occurrence of these concepts in texts related to football. For this
reason, and because the concepts studied are common, the unweighted cal-
culation will continue to be used.
Another issue in our discussion is the behavior of the profiles, i.e. which
profiles behave differently from the overall convergence tendency, and
whether they have anything in common with each other. The profiles with
divergent results are GOAL 2 , DRIBBLING, SHOT/PLAYING, MIDFIELDER,
SHOT/KICK and, to a lesser extent, FORWARD, OFFSIDE, PENALTY and
GOALKEEPER, which do not seem to exhibit common characteristics such as
to constitute a subgroup of their own. The only common characteristic is
the fact that some of the profiles relate to less frequent concepts, as Table 4
shows (we will come back to this question at the end of this section).
In conclusion, the results seem to indicate a slight convergence between
EP and BP between 1950 and 1970. However, this is a restricted conver-
gence. The evidence comes from the fact that the results change according
to the inclusion/exclusion of certain concepts, and to the evolutionary sta-
bility given by the unweighted measure.
As regards question (2), the percentages obtained for U and U’ shown
on the vertical lines in Figure 1 indicate that many more changes occurred
in the case of BP over a long term period (between 1950 and 2000) and
also in the first time period (from the 1950s to 1970). Furthermore, BP
seems to have got closer to EP between 1950 and 1970 (see the diagonal
line): B70 not only came closer to P70 but also to P50, namely U’ (B70,
P50) 48.04% is greater than U’ (B50, P50) 43.78%.
What the results clearly show is that internal evolution is stronger and
faster in BP than in EP. We could infer from this result that the approach
happens mainly in BP. This interpretation is problematic, though. On the
one hand, the fact that BP undergoes many changes may suggest that it is
recovering from a standardization underdevelopment in vocabulary related
to football (or in vocabulary in general), or that it wishes to conform to the
standard EP variety. On the other hand, the influence of Brazilian football
is well known and many Brazilian players and technicians have come to
Portugal. The expectation of the growing influence of BP over EP, particu-
larly in relation to football, as mentioned earlier, would mean, on the con-
trary, a greater shifting of EP towards BP, which is not confirmed by the
results presented in Figure 1. In fact, the difference between U’ (P00, B70)
58.09% and U’ (P70, B70) 55.17% is not high enough to warrant the con-
sideration that EP is moving towards BP.