On the position of sempre in Medieval Portuguese and in Modern European Portuguese

Abstract

In Modern European Portuguese the adverb sempre can have two different interpretations: a confirmative, non-temporal, and a temporal/aspectual interpretation. In the confirmative interpretation sempre means ‘after all’, and in the temporal/aspectual interpretation it means ‘always’. Each interpretation correlates with the position sempre occupies in the sentence. In this article we compare the behavior of sempre in modern varieties of Portuguese and in Medieval Portuguese (MP). Modern European Portuguese (MEP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) behave differently as to the placement and interpretation of sempre . This situation is assumed in the literature as deriving from aspects of clause structure, such as verb movement and licensing of null subjects (Brito, Clause structure, subject positions and verb movement: About the position of sempre in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, John Benjamins, 2001; Ambar, Gonzaga and Negrão, Tense, quantification and clause structure in EP and BP, John Benjamins, 2004, among others). In MP, however, sempre is always temporal/aspectual and can be placed before or after the verb. Therefore, we argue that the variation found in MP does not relate to structural differences of the kind that exist between MEP and BP, but rather to the inherent semantics of sempre . We propose that somewhere during the history of Portuguese there was a specialization of the adverb sempre , that resulted in the fact that its syntactic placement derives its meaning. In fact, we show that the first occurrences of non-temporal sempre appeared during the Classical Portuguese period.