Integrando a variação social e métodos quantitativos na investigação sobre linguagem e cognição: para uma sociolinguística cognitiva do português europeu e brasileiro

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First it argues the case for systematic integration of language variation and corpus-based methodology with its accompanying methods of quantitative and statistical analysis in the cognitive study of language, as it has been occurring in Cognitive Linguistics. The second and most important goal is to present a program for Cognitive Sociolinguistics of European and Brazilian Portuguese, centered in the issue of convergence and divergence between the two national varieties in the past 50 years. First, we will highlight two instances of tension in the current stage of the development of Cognitive Linguistics (one focus of tension on the object and the other on the methodology). Then we will show how its usage-based perspective implies to integrate and to correlate a social object and an empirical methodology. We will then identify specific contributions of the emergent Cognitive Sociolinguistics and onomasiological profile-based methodology to the study of language variation. Finally, we will show the results of our sociolexicological research about convergence and divergence in the vocabulary of ootball and clothing – the two national varieties converge for football and diverge for clothing – and we point out the extension of this first stage of research to the domains of functional words and non-lexical variables.