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The Portuguese pluperfect: diversity of forms, polysemy and interaction with adjuncts

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Published/Copyright: March 25, 2024
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Probus
From the journal Probus Volume 36 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper discusses the contemporary use of the Portuguese simple and two compound pluperfect forms (with the auxiliary verbs ter, and haver) of the indicative mood in written texts. Four topics are addressed. First, the claim that the simple pluperfect is currently a defective paradigm lacking the third person plural; this claim is confirmed and substantiated by looking at specific distinguishing contexts in corpora. Secondly, the competition between the three pluperfect forms, in written contemporary European and Brazilian Portuguese; it is shown that – contrary to some frequent comments in the literature – all three forms still have widespread usage, and occur in a relatively balanced way, in the type of registers considered (newspaper writing, modern literary texts, modern literary translations), in both varieties of the language. Thirdly, as regards semantic polyvalence, the possible existence of a deictic rather than anaphoric (temporal) pluperfect; it is argued that this type of pluperfect does indeed exist, and deserves separate grammatical recognition. Fourthly, the well-known cases of ambiguity in structures with pluperfect and temporal locating adjuncts, where the latter can act either as markers of the past perspective point required by the pluperfect, or as markers of the location time of the described eventualities; facts in English and Portuguese are compared, with some differences highlighted.

Keywords: pluperfect; tense; temporal adjuncts; temporal location; language variation
Corresponding author: Telmo Móia, Faculdade de Letras, Centro de Linguística, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, E-mail:

Funding source: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Award Identifier / Grant number: UIDB/00214/2020

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Professors Ana Maria Martins and Fernanda Pratas, for their kind invitation to take part in the Lisbon Festschrift for Mary Kato, a workshop in honour of Professor Mary Kato that took place at the School of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras) of the University of Lisbon, on May 23-26, 2023, where a preliminary version of this work was presented. I first met Professor Mary Kato around the year 2000, as a member of the project “European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese – Unity and diversity at the turn of the millennium (PEPB-2000)”, coordinated by her and by Professor João Andrade Peres, and I have been a great admirer of her scientific work and of her extraordinary human qualities ever since.

  1. Research funding: This paper was financed by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), as part of the research project UIDB/00214/2020.

References (including corpora)

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Corpora

[cetempúblico] Corpus cetempúblico 1.7 v. 11.5, http://www.linguateca.pt/ACDC/.Search in Google Scholar

[NILC/São Carlos] Corpus NILC/São Carlos v. 13.4, http://www.linguateca.pt/ACDC/.Search in Google Scholar

[PortFalDA] Corpus , v. 4.3, http://www.linguateca.pt/ACDC/.Search in Google Scholar

[Vercial] Corpus Vercial, acessível em http://www.linguateca.pt/ACDC/.Search in Google Scholar
Published Online: 2024-03-25
Published in Print: 2024-05-27

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Preface
  3. Preface
  4. Editorial
  5. Introduction: the interplay of theory and observation (introspective and other data)
  6. Articles
  7. Form Copy, Agree and Clitics
  8. Bilingual acquisition as the locus of syntactic change
  9. Is there hyper-raising in European Portuguese?
  10. An experimental study on the loss of VS order in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese
  11. A unitary account of indicative/subjunctive mood choice
  12. The Portuguese pluperfect: diversity of forms, polysemy and interaction with adjuncts
https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2024-2008
Keywords for this article
pluperfect; tense; temporal adjuncts; temporal location; language variation

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Preface
  3. Preface
  4. Editorial
  5. Introduction: the interplay of theory and observation (introspective and other data)
  6. Articles
  7. Form Copy, Agree and Clitics
  8. Bilingual acquisition as the locus of syntactic change
  9. Is there hyper-raising in European Portuguese?
  10. An experimental study on the loss of VS order in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese
  11. A unitary account of indicative/subjunctive mood choice
  12. The Portuguese pluperfect: diversity of forms, polysemy and interaction with adjuncts
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