Future temporal reference in Brazilian Portuguese: Past and present

Different forms convey future temporal reference in Portuguese. The recognition of these forms is a starting point towards examining their actual usage in the language. Of four acknowledged future forms, only two, i.e. the periphrastic ir + infinitive and the present variants, are productively used in contemporary spoken Brazilian Portuguese. There was therefore a need for reconstructing the future temporal reference system of early Portuguese, in order to shed light on the development of these forms in the future sector.; This study employs the methods of comparative and variationist linguistics in diachronic and synchronic data to analyse this development. These methods made it possible to identify the conditioning factors contributing to the selection of the variants in future contexts throughout the centuries and establish the direction of the linguistic evolution.; The first analyses concern the use of the future variants in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. They reveal that three variants were productively used to express the future: the synthetic future, haver + infinitive and the present. The synthetic future, which is acknowledged as the default form by prescriptive literature, had the highest overall probability of occurrence at that time, and was mainly favoured by contingent events, stative verbs and affirmative statements.; The second analyses concern the use of the variants in the nineteenth century: the synthetic future, haver + infinitive, the present and ir + infinitive. In that century, the synthetic future lost two of its favoured contexts, contingent events and affirmative utterances, to the present variant and ir + infinitive, respectively. That century witnessed the emergence of an adverbial specification pattern in Brazilian Portuguese that has also been observed in French.; The last analyses are related to the use of the future variants in the twentieth century. The results for the written data reveal that (i) haver + infinitive moved away from the future sector; (ii) the synthetic future declined; and (iii) the use of ir + infinitive highly increased. In the spoken data, only contingency and adverbial specification retained the present variant in the language. Ir + infinitive has almost completed its process of grammaticalization.; This research reveals that the future variants have been in variation for centuries in Portuguese, and have been involved in a complex process of incursion and withdrawal from the future context, which ultimately changed the representation of future temporal reference in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese. The variationist methodology makes it possible to ascertain that the difference in frequency of variant usage in the different centuries is correlated to their displacement of or expansion into specific linguistic contexts.