Types of Modality and Values of Future in Contemporary European Portuguese - A Proposal of Campos (1998) and some Exemples from the Narrative Text Memorial do Convento of José Saramago

Abstract

The starting point for this article is the initial universally acknowledged consideration that the forms of future tenses, in natural languages and as well in contemporary European Portuguese, are associated, in addition to the temporal values, also to the modal ones. In view of the article’s outcomes, it seems safe to conclude that in contemporary European Portuguese, the future tense, denominated futuro em -r-, considering its temporal values and uses, implicates always a modal component that cannot be evacuated.
Considering the theoretical framework of Campos (1998), it can also be claimed that, in the light of the continuous scale of assertive values (escala contínua de valores assertivos), the modal values, marked by futuro em -r-, can be represented in this scale so that the ‘future of supposition’ is situated at a point near to, or coincident with the pole zero - the pole of non-assertion. The ‘future of certainty’, in turn, can be represented as situated at a point which tends to the pole one - the pole of the assertion, positive or negative. The observations of Campos (1998) were exemplified by some examples of European Portuguese, that is, some narrative sequences taken from the work of José Saramago’s Memorial do Convento, which constituted the corpus of analysis, to illustrate and verify each of the values, as proposed in Campos (1998). The analysis of the forms of the ‘futuro em -r-’ in the narrative sequences analyzed proved the classification of the uses and values of the Campos proposal (1998).