78 Augusto Soares da Silva
Finally, we hope to have shown the advantages of the cognitive perspec-
tive and of corpus-based and quantitative methodology (particularly the
onomasiological perspective and profile-based methodology) for the study
of the relationships between these two national varieties of Portuguese. We
hope, in other words, to have contributed to the development of Portuguese
cognitive sociolinguistics.
Of course, more research needs to be done into the issue of convergence
and divergence between the two national varieties of the Portuguese lan-
guage. As a present extension of this study, we intend to include (i) words
from other lexical fields, such as health, and (ii) function words, namely
prepositions. Prepositional profiles are limited to the same complements
and syntagmatic context in order to satisfy the denotational synonymy con-
dition. As a future extension to this study, we wish to include the field of
grammar, to analyze non-lexical variables, namely syntactic and morpho-
logical ones. The aim is to study correlations between lexical and non-
lexical variables and compare their impact on convergence/divergence and
the stratification of the two national varieties of the Portuguese language.
Given the attentional distinction between lexicon (more awareness) and
syntax (less awareness), the hypothesis is that function words and syntactic
constructions diverge more than content words.
We could not conclude this paper without pointing out briefly the main
differences and similarities in the process of lexical convergence and diver-
gence between the present study and that of Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and
Speelman (1999) for Dutch. The main similarities are the higher signific-
ance of weighted measures and the more frequent onomasiological profiles,
in the sense that they reflect the evolutionary trends in a better way than the
less frequent profiles. Other similarities are the correlation between global
evolutionary tendencies and internal linguistic features, the impact of for-
eign influence and the synchronic stratificational asymmetry. With regard
to the differences between the studies, essentially two can be singled out.
First, while the two national varieties of Dutch are clearly convergent, the
two national varieties of Portuguese tend to be divergent. More important-
ly, the whole evolutionary situation (external and internal) is clearer and
more homogeneous in Dutch than in Portuguese. Second, unlike the Dutch
case where the Belgian variety clearly shows an exogenous orientation to
conform to the Netherlandic variety, the Portuguese case does not exhibit
any global unilateral orientation of one variety towards the other. In both
languages, one variety exhibits more movement, diachronically speaking,
than the other, but contrary to the Belgian variety, the movement of the