‘I know the answer’

Progressive forms and meanings: the curious case of Capeverdean

“…Previous descriptions of data from the variety of Santiago point to the fact that the salient opposition regarding grammatical aspect in that variety is between the progressive and the perfect, rather than between the imperfective and the perfective. This was proposed in Pratas ( , 2012aPratas ( , 2014 and is also assumed here, with some relevant adaptations. In most cases, these progressive and perfect values are not obtained through a structure that includes an auxiliary verb, such as happens in English (be+V-ing for the progressive, have+participle for the perfect) and many other languages -"perfects and progressives are overwhelmingly periphrastic" (Dahl / Velupillai 2005: 2); see also for an overview of the progressive in European languages.…”

“…Look at the following set of sentences: again, we have a bare form conveying a past event information (through a null perfect morpheme) in (30a), a progressive (30b) and a habitual (30c) -given the right context, this sentence may have a future reading. Contrasts such as (30) were used elsewhere to defend that modern ta has a complex modal/ quantificational function (Pratas , 2012a, and, as such, ta was not included in the temporal analysis for Santiago presented in 2.1, which was focused on other distinctions. Under a very specific perspective, however, this needs no longer be the case.…”

“…B. Since the past versions of these constructions always need a context (linguistic or extra-linguistic) that locates TU after TT, the main function of the morphemes that are associated with past perfects, past habituals and past progressives could be said to be marking tense (and this has been assumed in , 2012a. They are, however, better analysed as a type of temporal agreement/concord markers, licensed by the time reference brought about by the context.…”

Capeverdean reflexives: the importance of a silent Voice

“…The temporal and aspectual interpretation of the sentence is conveyed by the same morphemes, and their various combinations, that guarantee this information in their active counterparts: Null Perfect (Pratas 2012(Pratas , 2014, progressive sata, the modal ta (that participates both in habitual and in future constructions) and the past variant of the passive -du, which is -da (Pratas 2007(Pratas , 2010Rendall, in prep. ) In the resultative passive (33), the verb may also be marked with the passive morpheme, but, as opposed to verbal passives, an auxiliary is at stake here: fika, here meaning 'become' .…”

“…3 The Capeverdean bare form of most verbs has a complex tense and aspect interpretation that is correspondent to certain readings of the English Present Perfect (cf. Pratas 2010Pratas , 2012, for an overview of all the temporal morphemes and interpretations available in the language). 4 One anonymous reviewer pointed out that in this paper " [t]here is an across the board concern with comparing Capeverdean with Portuguese and English.…”