“Temporal Meanings in Two Varieties of Capeverdean”
Fernanda Pratas – University of Lisbon
Wednesday, Oct 10 at 1:30 in Herter 301

ABSTRACT:
In Capeverdean, a Portuguese-based Creole, there seem to be no dedicated tense morphemes, with past, present and future situations being rather expressed by aspect and mood, combined with the linguistic context and pragmatic inferences.
In the variety spoken in the island of Santiago, the postverbal morpheme -ba seems indeed associated with a tense value: past. However, the picture gets more complicated when we look at complex sentences where this morpheme marks what seem infinitival verbs within the scope of modal expressions. These wider contexts clearly point to this morpheme as a temporal concord/agreement marker, and this is the proposal to be defended here.

If this analysis for Santiago -ba is on the right track, it is even more adequate to the case of the (much younger) variety spoken in São Vicente: here we have rather slightly different preverbal forms for present and past progressives and habituals, as well as, for past perfect, a suppletive form of the Portuguese auxiliary tinha ‘had’ + suppletive participle forms.