Galego-Portuguese - Portuguese

Name, Place and Date

  • Dialect: Galego-Portuguese - Portuguese
  • Linguistic Classification: Galego-Portuguese - Portuguese
  • Town:
  • Region:
  • Country: Portugal
  • Latitude/Longitude: 38°42'00"N 9°11'00"W
  • Linguistic Date: late 20th to early 21st century

Notes

  • Inflected infinitive

    It is often suggested that the 'inflected infinitive' is a continuant of the Latin imperfect subjunctive. The issue is a controversial one: T. Maurer (O infinito flexionado português, São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1968) gives a critical survey of the arguments for this view, and argues against it. From a purely morphological point of view it must be said that is not impossible that this set of forms continues the Latin imperfect subjunctive, but we have preferred to take a 'neutral' stance by labelling it 'Portuguese inflected infinitive'.

  • Future and conditional

    In (literary) modern European Portuguese the future and conditional tense-forms optionally display 'mesoclisis', that is the presence of a clitic pronoun inside the word-form. In such cases the clitic immediately precedes the endings -ɐj, -aʃ, -a, -emuʃ, -ɐjʃ, -ɐ̃ũ (for the future) and -iɐ, -iɐʃ, -iɐ, -iɐmuʃ, -iɐjʃ, -iɐ̃ũ (for the conditional). The portion of the verb-form to the left of the clitic, in this case, is identical to the infinitive (and constitutes an independent phonological word), with the exception of the reflexes of DICERE and FACERE, where the relevant form is dir- and far-. Where the clitic is a third person direct object form, or a first person plural object form, the /r/ characteristic of the future and conditional is (apparently) absent (what is involved is in fact a process of sandhi arising in combination with the clitic, the details of which we cannot pursue here). For example, for the reflex of FACERE, for normal fɐˈɾa, fɐˈɾiɐ (3sg future and conditional), we find faluˈa, faluˈiɐ (cf. infinitive fɐˈzeɾ), with a mesoclitic third person singular masculine pronoun.

Verbs

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