62 Augusto Soares da Silva
(2) foreign influence (loanwords): to assess the impact of English and
French influence on the global convergent/divergent evolution.Endo-/exogenousness is mathematically derived from the corpus: endogen-
ous words are typical terms found in a sub-corpus (they occur more fre-
quently in this sub-corpus) and exogenous words are typical terms from the
rest of the corpus. Hence, a word which is endogenous in a language varie-
ty will be exogenous in the other language variety and vice-versa. There is
yet a third feature – normative influence – which could be considered, so as
to evaluate the consequences of linguistic propaganda on the global con-
vergent/divergent evolution. At this stage, unfortunately, it cannot be as-
sessed due to lack of data.
4.1. Endo-/exogenousness
This parameter involves the calculation of the proportion of items with
‘binational’ (AUNI), ‘endogenous’ (AENDO) and ‘exogenous’ (AEXO) fea-
tures. Featural measures A and A’ mentioned in section 2 are used to calcu-
late the proportion of items exhibiting these features. Before A and A’ are
calculated, ENDO, EXO and UNI values in relation to the studied terms must
be measured. The endo-/exogenousness values of a term X – denoting a
concept Z – are calculated on the basis of the differential influence of X
over the relation between the onomasiological profiles of the concept Z in
Y 1 e Y 2 samples under comparison. Consider the following example: if X’s
relative frequency is 30% in Y 1 and 0% in Y 2 , then X’s differential value is
maximal, that is, 1 (in a 0–1 scale) or 100%. Also in this example, X’s EN-
DO value is 1 in Y 1 and X’s EXO value is 0 in Y 1. By definition, X’s endo-
genousness value in Y 1 and X’s exogenousness value in Y 2 are the same,
and the sum of the X’s endogenousness and exogenousness values equals
its differential value. On the other hand, X’s UNI value corresponds to the
difference between 1 (the maximal value in the 0–1 scale) and its differen-
tial value. While ENDO e EXO measure the stronger or weaker position of X
in Y 1 in comparison with Y 2 , respectively, UNI measures X’s contribution to
the uniformity between Y 1 and Y 2 (see Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speel-
man 1999: 49-53 for technical details). A direct relation between the pro-
portion of the terms with a certain UNI value and uniformity measure U
used in the previous section can, therefore, be posited.
We can use the endo-/exogenousness measures and relate them to the
global evolutionary patterns described above through uniformity measures.