The expression of futurity in Spanish and Portuguese: similarities and differences

Abstract

Abstract. The primary goal of this paper is to establish a comparison between the two most important forms that express futurity in Spanish and in European Portuguese, viz. the Futuro Simple / Futuro Simples (Simple Future) and the structure ir (‘go’) a / ir (‘go’) + Infinitive. Whereas the Simple Future behaves quite similarly in both languages, conveying temporal information of posteriority that may be strongly constrained by modal and aspectual factors, the periphrastic construction differs considerably in Spanish and in European Portuguese. In effect, contrary to its Spanish counterpart, which is considered, in the literature, ambiguous between an aspectual (prospective) and a temporal (future) operator, the data from European Portuguese point towards a consistent temporal meaning for the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive. So, we investigate the conditions under which these forms are licenced, in order to describe their semantic similarities and differences; moreover, since they both mainly bear temporal information, we compare the behaviour of the European Portuguese Simple Future and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, proposing that the former is less restricted than the latter: besides the location of a given situation in a future interval, ir (‘go’) + Infinitive seems to require an additional temporal boundary preventing the relevant eventuality to overlap the speech time.

The expression of futurity in reporting texts: some remarks on the verbal forms of European Portuguese

“…Se tem sido unanimemente aceite que, em PE, a construção ir + infinitivo expressa, essencialmente, uma relação temporal de posterioridade (cf. OLIVEIRA; LOPES, 1995;OLIVEIRA, 2013;CUNHA, 2022), já a caracterização do futuro simples está sujeita a alguma controvérsia. Surgem na literatura, com efeito, propostas muito diversas, por vezes mesmo divergentes, que se propõem dar conta do comportamento deste tempo gramatical.…”

“…o exemplo (8)). Para uma discussão mais aprofundada das diferentes propostas para o tratamento do futuro simples, bem como das suas vantagens e limitações, veja-se e.g Cunha (2022)…”

Variant Choices of Future Time Reference in Galician: The Grammaticalization of [haber (de) + infinitive] as a Window to Diachronic Change

“…However, in the 19th century, [ir (PRESENT) + INFINITIVE] entered into competition for future marking and eventually prevailed (Poplack and Malvar 2007, p. 157), relegating the haver option to formal written contexts (Brazilian Portuguese) or to constructions usually expressing a strong modal meaning (European Portuguese). Consequently, futurity is typically expressed by means of the periphrastic construction with ir in present-day Portuguese (Gradoville 2019;Cunha 2021Cunha , 2022.…”