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

Abstract

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

Fluency profile: comparison between Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers

“…Studies show that Portuguese spoken in Brazil and Portugal differs in several linguistic levels (1) , including semantic, morphosyntactic, phonetic/phonological, among others. The differences between Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) go beyond the segmental level, reaching the prosodic level (2,3) .…”