As leituras futurativas do presente do indicativo e a noção de coerção temporal

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to provide cues for an appropriate treatment of the futurate readings that arise in some contexts with the Presente do Indicativo (Simple Present) in European Portuguese. I will try to demonstrate that an analysis based on the past vs. non-past distinction, such as the one developed by Giannakiodu (2014) to explain contrasts in Greek and Italian, is not sufficient to account for the European Portuguese data since there is not a systematic ambiguity between future and non-future readings with the present tense in EP and because not all predicates can be located in an interval subsequent to the utterance time when they combine with the tense under analysis. In this regard, I will adduce some arguments in favour of a treatment in which the Presente do Indicativo (Simple Present) is temporally "coerced" (or, more appropriately, undergoes some temporal shift) in order to provide future information. In this perspective, the "futurate present" comes about as a "derived" temporal reading