El pluricentrismo del portugués: aspectos generales y elementos del enfoque sociolectométrico

This paper briefly examines the status of Portuguese as a pluricentric language and gíves an account of the most relevant results obtaíned from a socio-cognitíve and socio-lectometríc approach to the two main varieties of Portuguese, namely European and Brazilían Portuguese. According to the tenets of Cognitive Sociolinguistics and thanks to the use of advanced socio-lectometry, I have found lexical, syntactic and attítudinal features that underpin the divergence between both varieties that has been noted over the past 60 years, and suggest the existence of a symmetric pluricentric language. The study focuses on onomasiological variation of denotational synonyms (lexical and syntactic), that is, alternative terms and constructíons with the sarne meaning or function, but sociolinguistically or stylístícally different. The results show that the analysis of alternative lexical and constructional expressions caters for a more refined study of the convergence / divergence of language varieties, as well as of the possible differences of social stratification.