The «futuro perfeito» in contemporary european portuguese: semantic change

Abstract

The futuro perfeito, a compound tense of the indicative, is traditionally described as a tense that indicates anteriority in the future, having as a point of reference another tense that is also future. Another value referred to by traditional descriptions is the modal of conjecture or uncertainty. Currently, we rarely use this tense with temporal value. It is used, above all, with modal values, namely as mediative, in journalistic discourse, in the news genre, with evidential value: the source of knowledge is not the speaker, who received it from another origin. In contrast with other Romance languages, the futuro perfeito has a reporting value. In European Portuguese, the conditional is not the tense that serves more usually to indicate a reported source of information. The main and most frequent current reporting value seems to stem from the epistemic modal value. Indicating that a proposition refers to facts that happened (which stems from its perfeito aspect value) but not assuming it as necessarily true, this tense configures discursive uses in which a speaker reports statements about specific facts, without taking responsibility for the respective validation.