Change in Portuguese verbal system: the variants of conditional and the issue of grammaticalization

Abstract

Recent studies have focused the grammaticalization of the verb of movement ir (to go) into an auxiliary verb. This paper shows that in Brazilian Portuguese this auxiliary occurs not only in the expression of the future (time) but also in variation with the conditional; it also shows that the use of the verbal periphrasis with ir has increased diachronically. Until the first half of the XX th century, this auxiliary co-occured with another one, haver de, in this context (irrealis). This paper presents, in addition, the several sematic values for each one of the referred auxiliaries, which may signalize the different semantic levels of the same linguistic form in a grammaticalization process. This study is based on a sample organized for a real-time observation of linguistic change considering a long run of time (a sample of theater plays).