Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to discuss the validity of Lobo’s proposal (2003) of distinguishing two types of adverbial perfect participial clauses (APC) in European Portuguese; and (ii) to ascertain the key factors behind their temporal interpretation. To achieve these aims, we compare and contrast patterns displayed by APC in European, Brazilian, Mozambican and Angolan Portuguese and British English across a corpus built from newspapers. Our research reveals that the data do not reflect the bipartite division argued for by Lobo and that, for Portuguese varieties, the position of APC in the sentence and the combinations of some aspectual classes are important to infer temporal relations, whereas, for British English, the anterior orientation/perfect aspect of the perfect participle imposes for most cases an anteriority temporal relation, surpassing the influence of any other factor.

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