Purificação Silvano

Sequence of tenses in complementation structures: Lexical restrictions and effects on language acquisition

In this paper we discuss the combinations of tenses in main and complement clauses of European Portuguese, focusing on the issue that restrictions on the tenses allowed in complement clauses are observed with some predicates but not with others. We show that these lexical restrictions are independent of the mood occurring in the complement clause, though an integrated analysis of mood and tense may be achieved. The proposal is made that the observed lexical restrictions on embedded tenses have a semantic basis and follow from the fact that Portuguese is an SOT-language, that is, a language where embedded tenses have semantic import. A preliminary investigation is conducted on the sequences of tenses produced at early stages of language acquisition.

Sobre a caracterização temporal de frases complexas com orações adverbiais finais com para em Português Europeu

The main goal of this paper is to discuss the temporal behaviour of European Portuguese factive purpose clauses introduced by para (‘to’) + non-inflected Infinitives. We will argue that a posteriority temporal relation, resulting from the interaction between the lexical properties of the connective and the Result Rhetorical Relation, is crucial to understand the temporal possibilities displayed in these sentences. However, we will demonstrate that other semantic factors, such as the aspectual profile of the eventualities and the Rhetorical Relations that may arise in these constructions, also play a decisive role in determining the final temporal ordering of the clauses.