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"Future Present Progressive in Brazilian Portuguese"

Brazilian Portuguese
Português Brasileiro [portuˈɡe(j)s]
Spoken in Brazil
Region South America
Total speakers 190 million (2010 census)
Language family Indo-European
Writing system Latin
Official status
Official language in Brazil
Regulated by not regulated
Language codes
ISO 639-1 639-1:pt-BR
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3 639-3:por
Linguasphere

Master Thesis's Synopsis

Brazilian_Portuguese


Edited by: Franciane Rocha


The Future Present Progressive (FPP), a construction that features a verbal complex (Aux. pres + V. prog)in the Present Progressive + a temporal adverb that introduces the Future Tense is gaining in popularity in Brazilian Portuguese.

Estou viajando a Paris amanhã.
“I am travelling to Paris tomorrow”
Estou
estou
be1SGPRES
AUX
viajando
viajando
travelGER
V
a
a
to
PREP
Paris
paris
ParisOBJ
N
amanhã
amanhã
tomorrow
ADVtemp


Based on Garcia (2010) [1] and Cintra (2008) [2] we assume that the FPP found its way into BP through English. Following Murray and Copley (2002) [3], we assume that the FPP is used when the speaker wishes to express that the action intended is not only a desire, but also a project that in some way it has already started to happen. Copley refers to this construction as a Futurate.

In my thesis I show the productivity of the FPP in Brazilian Portuguese. I investigate why Brazilian Portuguese allows FPPs with some verbs and completely forbids them with other verbs:


(1) Estamos nos mudando em duas semanas. (We are moving in two weeks.)
(2) *Ele está percebendo a verdade amanhã cedo. (*He is realizing the true tomorrow morning.)


My thesis focuses on the aspectual properties of the construction and the semantic relation between the grammatical and lexical aspect. To quote Tani (2004: 2) [4] “when a certain type of verb does not appear in a certain grammatical environment, the reason must lie in the relationship between the two aspects”. A similar observation was already made by Lyons (1977) [5].

As a first generalization one can probably say that the aspect of the main predicate and the grammatical aspect of the syntactic structure must be compatible. To check compatibility patterns for FPP constructions in Brazilian Portuguese, we will depart from the Vendler’s (1967)[6] classification of verbs. According to this categorization, verbs are classified into four semantic categories namely: achievements, activities, accomplishments and states. However, while Vendler’s classification might work well for English this is not necessarily the case for BP. While for English only two aktionsarten can be construed with the progressive (Vendler, 1967) [7], that is, accomplishments and activities, for Portuguese all four aktionsarten are grammatically correct (Bastos, 2004)[8]. So, departing from these observations, we will try to unveil the constraints and particularities of Future Present Progressive expressions in naturally occurring data from Brazilian Portuguese.

Corpus = Future Present Progressive In Brazilian Portuguese
Annotator = Franciane Rocha


References

  1. Garcia A. S. . Verbos incompatíveis com o progressivo no inglês. SOLETRAS (UERJ), v. 20, p. 146-164, 2010.
  2. Cintra MR. A perífrase “ir (pres.) + (es)ta(r) + gerúndio” como indício de inovação linguística. Estudos Linguísticos, São Paulo, v.37, n.1. 2008 p. 233-241.
  3. http://copley.free.fr/copley.futurates.pdf
  4. http://www.flet.keio.ac.jp/~colloq/articles/backnumb/Col_25_tani.pdf
  5. J. Lyons (1977). Semantics. Volumes I and II. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  6. Vendler Z. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967.
  7. Vendler Z. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967.
  8. Bastos ACP. Progressive constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and English. Revista Letras, Curitiba, n. 63. Editora UFPR. 2004: p. 11-27, maio/ago.


Contact: franrocha.fsaATgmail.com