On The Indexicality of Portuguese Past Tenses

This paper investigates the semantics of Portuguese past tenses, focusing on their indexical behavior. I show that under certain circumstances, even when they are used anaphorically and refer to a contextually salient interval, these past tense heads can denote intervals that do not precede the speech time. I argue that the best way to capture this behavior is to construe its presupposition as a shiftable indexical (Schlenker 2003; Anand 2006), with a meaning roughly paraphrasable as ‘earlier than τ(c)’, with τ(c) being set to some context (attitude-like) time, not necessarily the speech time. I also argue that non-anaphoric uses of the Portuguese verb form called Pretérito Perfeito should be analyzed as present tense + perfect aspect combinations, as was suggested in Giorgi and Pianesi (1998). In particular I show that Portuguese instantiates what is called double access readings in past under past configurations that mimic the more well known cases involving embedded present tenses in attitudinal contexts (Abusch 1997; Ogihara 1996, inter alia). keywords: double-accessibility; indexicality; past tenses; perfect; Portuguese