Hispanic Linguistics at the Crossroads

In this paper we discuss the combinations of tenses in main and complement clauses of European Portuguese, focusing on the issue that restrictions on the tenses allowed in complement clauses are observed with some predicates but not with others. We show that these lexical restrictions are independent of the mood occurring in the complement clause, though an integrated analysis of mood and tense may be achieved. The proposal is made that the observed lexical restrictions on embedded tenses have a semantic basis and follow from the fact that Portuguese is an SOT-language; i.e., a language where embedded tenses have semantic import. A preliminary investigation is conducted on the sequences of tenses produced at early stages of language acquisition. 1 This work was developed at Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL), within the project Complement Clauses in the Acquisition of Portuguese (CLAP) (PTDC/CLELIN/120897/2010), sponsored by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).