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Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 32, Utrecht
Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 263–286

Chapter 14
On adverbial perfect participial clauses in Portuguese varieties and British English

| Universidade do Porto and CLUP
| Universidade do Porto and CLUP
| Universidade de Beira Interior | INESC TEC – Porto

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to discuss the validity of Lobo’s proposal (2003) of distinguishing two types of adverbial perfect participial clauses (APC) in European Portuguese; and (ii) to ascertain the key factors behind their temporal interpretation. To achieve these aims, we compare and contrast patterns displayed by APC in European, Brazilian, Mozambican and Angolan Portuguese and British English across a corpus built from newspapers. Our research reveals that the data do not reflect the bipartite division argued for by Lobo and that, for Portuguese varieties, the position of APC in the sentence and the combinations of some aspectual classes are important to infer temporal relations, whereas, for British English, the anterior orientation/perfect aspect of the perfect participle imposes for most cases an anteriority temporal relation, surpassing the influence of any other factor.

Keywords: adverbial perfect participial clauses, corpus-based study, Portuguese varieties, British English, typology, temporal interpretation, aspectual classes, ordering, tense
Article outline
  • 1.The problem
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1The data and method
  • 3.Discussion of findings
    • 3.1Temporal readings and position
    • 3.2Temporal readings and tense of the main clause
    • 3.3Temporal readings and aspectual classes
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.357.14sil
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