Differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese in the use of temporal adverbials

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a partial description of the main differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese concerning the form and interpretation of temporal adverbials. Two temporal domains are described in relatively more detail: the expression of anchored temporal measurement and the expression of duration. However, differences in other semantic domains – such as simple temporal location, quantification over time intervals, correlation of events and frequency – are also mentioned and briefly illustrated. It will be shown that, overall, the system of temporal adverbials is remarkably similar in European and Brazilian Portuguese, the differences being mainly lexical, lexical-syntactic or morpho-syntactic.