Helena Margarida Guerra de Oliveira Rodeiro A expressão da ...

keywords
abstract
indirect speech, verb tense, moment of speech, reference points, journalistic discourse,
contrastive analysis
The scope of this work is to describe, analyse and interpret the semantic and temporal
behaviour of Portuguese and German verb tenses, within indirect speech. The
reintegration of a former enunciation in another speech situation that brings it to a new
context, presupposes the impossibility to completely restore the original illocutionary
act as well as deictic and temporal changes, in which verb tenses are central. The
location and contextualization of verb tenses takes into account the relevance of the
moment of speech and other reference points that specify relative time location. In the
attempt to develop a work based on authentic texts that enable the contextual
integration of tenses and the interpretation of several resulting temporal configurations,
the selected corpus consists of journalistic excerpts taken from Portuguese and German
press. In order to contrast the two languages, this paperwork also aims at establishing
and describing the main semantic and temporal similarities and differences between the
two verbal systems in what indirect speech within journalistic discourse is concerned.