A alternância entre o futuro do pretérito e o pretérito imperfeito no português brasileiro: variação estável ou mudança em progresso?

Abstract

The conditional future tense (FP) is the verb tense in the indicative way used to refer to an event after a past, an event that may or may not occur, depending on a condition, in addition to transmitting modal values ​​of hypothesis, possibility, desire, need, etc. The FP tends to vary, in some contexts of use, with the imperfect past tense (PI), which is traditionally used to talk about a habit or event that occurred frequently in the past or to refer to a fact interrupted by another fact concomitant. Thus, expressions such as "if I were you, buy more books" or "if I were you, buy more books" and the periphrastic forms “would still” comparable and “would buy”, respectively, are usually used with the same truth value. Research on this topic, supported by the Theory of Linguistic Change, has already been developed in different regions of Brazil and the purpose of this article is, therefore, to describe and correlate results of some of these researches, observing, above all, if these results point to a phenomenon of steady variation or change in progress.