The expression of futurity in Spanish and Portuguese: similarities and differences

Abstract

Abstract. The primary goal of this paper is to establish a comparison between the two most important forms that express futurity in Spanish and in European Portuguese, viz. the Futuro Simple / Futuro Simples (Simple Future) and the structure ir (‘go’) a / ir (‘go’) + Infinitive. Whereas the Simple Future behaves quite similarly in both languages, conveying temporal information of posteriority that may be strongly constrained by modal and aspectual factors, the periphrastic construction differs considerably in Spanish and in European Portuguese. In effect, contrary to its Spanish counterpart, which is considered, in the literature, ambiguous between an aspectual (prospective) and a temporal (future) operator, the data from European Portuguese point towards a consistent temporal meaning for the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive. So, we investigate the conditions under which these forms are licenced, in order to describe their semantic similarities and differences; moreover, since they both mainly bear temporal information, we compare the behaviour of the European Portuguese Simple Future and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, proposing that the former is less restricted than the latter: besides the location of a given situation in a future interval, ir (‘go’) + Infinitive seems to require an additional temporal boundary preventing the relevant eventuality to overlap the speech time.