The expression of PRESENT TENSE in Brazilian Portuguese

diachronic change across four centuries

Abstract

In his Introdução ao estudo do aspecto verbal na língua portuguesa, Ataliba T. de Castilho (1968) argues that the present is less a tense than a tense with an aspectual tendency. Indeed, in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese (BP) the synthetic present does not convey simultaneity with the moment of speech, a function taken over by the periphrasis estar ‘be’ + gerund. We aim to investigate, from a Generative Grammar perspective, the diachrony of this aspectual tendency, determining how present tense per se was expressed over four centuries and when BP came to prefer the analytic form. We analysed Brazilian theatrical comedies from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, drawn from the Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese; occurrences of the synthetic and analytic present were extracted and classified according to their aspectual, temporal and modal readings, and the data were then submitted to inferential tests (logistic regression, Cochran–Armitage trend test and chi-square). Until the end of the nineteenth century, the synthetic present conveyed not only aspectual values but also present tense per se; only in the first quarter of the twentieth century, with the crossover point estimated at 1910, did the analytic form become the majority strategy. The aspectual tendency of the synthetic present remained constant throughout the documented diachrony, whereas its temporal reading declined significantly; the periphrasis, in turn, stably maintained the coexistence of temporal and aspectual readings and never conveyed modal value. Performative verbs, finally, remain as a residue of the earlier system. We propose that the lexical verb in the synthetic present checked Tense and Aspect features in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but ceased to check temporal features in the twentieth and twenty-first, retaining only Aspect. The functional projection of Tense became inert with respect to lexical verbs and active only with auxiliaries, a parametric change from a meso- to a microparameter that surfaces, in E-language, as the advanced state of analyticisation of BP, possibly triggered by feature economy in acquisition and by language contact, and that lends formal support to Castilho's long-standing intuition.