Lexical convergence and divergence in Portuguese 75As regards semantic field, this feature has demonstrated that football
and clothing terms indicate different results as far as conver-
gence/divergence is concerned: evidence has shown restricted convergence
in the semantic field of football and a clear divergence in the semantic field
of clothing. Therefore, we have to analyze other semantic fields. However,
both lexical fields indicate identical results as regards other aspects of lexi-
cal relationships between the two varieties of Portuguese.
As regards frequency, uniformity has seen to be higher with the more
frequent concepts in both semantic fields: as we observed earlier, U’ values
are always higher (generally by 10%) than U values. This means that the
more frequent concepts show better the global evolution trend (in the case
of clothing, less frequent concepts also indicate divergence).
Finally, as regards recent concepts, three of them appear in the field of
clothing after 1950: T-SHIRT, JEANS and LEGGINGS. The uniformity U of the
first one is rather low because existing items were selected to name this
new concept. The U value of JEANS and LEGGINGS is somewhat higher than
the U average in 2000. Despite the limited empirical basis (only 3 con-
cepts), it can be said that the divergent evolution in the vocabulary of cloth-
ing starts only after a certain period of adaptation.
- Synchronic analysis: stratification results
Let’s now analyze the question of stratification or current distance between
the standard strata and the substandard strata (not strictly dialectal, but of
an intermediate level). To this purpose, we will compare data in the field of
football from the formal register of newspapers of the 1990s/2000s (P00
and B00) and data from the informal register of Internet chats (Psub00 and
Bsub00). In the case of clothing, we will compare the data of the more for-
mal and national register of fashion magazines from the 1990s/2000s (P00
and B00) and data from the informal and more local register of the labels
pictured from clothes shops (Psub00 and Bsub00). The extension of the two
sub-corpora (chats and labels) of the substandard strata and the respective
number of observations were already mentioned in section 2. The results
are as follows (on the left are the unweighted U and weighted U’ uniformi-
ty percentages for EP; on the right are the unweighted U and weighted U’
uniformity percentages for BP):