Revision as of 14:23, 1 June 2012

The project

This page makes part of the ISK Speiderprojects for Spring 2012, developed at the Department of Language and Communication of NTNU

We have learned that well constructed corpora are not only a result of an in-depth linguistic analysis, but that they also can inform linguistic research. But in spite of a growing number of public language corpora, finding the information that is relevant to ones specific research purpose is still a challenge. When looking for linguistic information on the web, a lot can be found, yet standard search engines give us very general information peppered with information that is totally useless making search on the net also for a researcher often a waste time.

The beginning of our needs as linguists regarding to the current search technologies can be represented by the question: How does one get close to the pulse of agents that deal with language? Our answer is that for those, dealing with languages, what really matters is to gain direct access to linguistic data and to find easy ways to interpret this data. Therefore, in our project, we would like to show one possible way to provide users of language with the access to data they seek and the necessary insight to interpret this data.

This project is meant to show that results of linguistic research can be made interesting not only to other linguists, but also to language learners and lovers of language in a simple and direct way. Our intention is to provide direct access to part of our research data, in our project, but beyond that goal, we would like to focus on how we can make our data-driven research interesting and easy to grasp.

Then, we talk here about future expression in Brazilian_Portuguese (BP). We will look at the effect of language change on the use of the Future Tense, gathering valuable bibliographic and multimedia material on this topic.

Future in Brazilian Portuguese - Variability

The variability in the expression of future is a characteristic phenomenon of Romanic languages. Besides in Portuguese, this phenomenon has been described for French, Italian and Spanish (Oliveira and Olinda 2008, p. 94). Linguists have identified at least four “default” forms conveying primary future meaning. These are the simple future, the future present, the ‘haver’ (be to) periphrasis and the ‘ir’ (go) periphrasis.

In the following you get a view of annotated data of these future forms, as well as audio and video samples of occurrences of these forms of expression in Brazilian music. The songs included here can also be seen in annotated corpus by clicking the link respective to each youtube video.

Simple future

Um índio: Caetano Veloso

Present Future

Periphrastic IR (go) future

Mulan - Vou fazer um homem de você

Periphrastic HAVER (to be) future

Prescriptive grammars, until recently, only acknowledge the synthetic or simple future, yet diachronic studies of future expression in Brazilian Portuguese agree that the simple future is in the process of being substituted by the periphrastic forms, specially the ‘ir’ periphrasis and to a minor extent by the future present.

References on Future in Brazilian Portuguese - Variability