The pluricentricity of Portuguese: a sociolecto-metrical approach to divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese

This paper investigates the divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese in the last 60 years on three levels, namely lexical variation, constructional variation, and language attitudes. The study is concerned with onomasio-logical variation between semantically equivalent words or constructions (denotational synonyms). It applies advanced corpus-based and sociolectometrical methods to measure convergence and divergence between language varieties. These measures are based on onomasiological profiles, i.e. sets of alternative synonymous words/constructions, together with their frequencies. The use of the onomasiological profile-based method allows for a control mechanism to avoid thematic bias in the corpus. The study combines different types of empirical data, both corpus-based and survey-based. An overview of the pluricentricity of Portuguese and the cultural models for the Portuguese pluricentricity is provided in the first sections of the paper, followed by an analysis of lexical, constructional and attitudinal variables. The lexical variables include thousands of observations of the usage of alternative terms to refer to 43 nominal concepts from the lexical fields of football and clothing. The material was extracted from a large corpus of sports newspapers and fashion magazines from the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s/2000s, Internet chats related to football and labels from clothes shops. The constructional variables include 15 prepositional, complement and noun-adjective constructions taken from the same corpus. The attitudinal variables were elicited by means of a survey that included 15 clothing concepts. The clothing terms confirm the hypothesis of diachronic divergence between the two national varieties and suggest symmetric pluricentricity (whereas the football terms indicate a slight convergence). Despite a few methodological issues (the problems of equivalence of meaning and attitudinal approach), the constructional and attitudinal variables selected replicate the lexical variables as indicators of divergence.