Indirect speech in Portuguese: backshift or non-backshift

Abstract

In this study, our aim was to discuss the conditions for non-backshift in Indirect Speech in Portuguese. We focused on the distribution of MQP (backshifting) and PPS (non-backshifting), in a “past in past” context. As this tense alternation cannot be ascribed to temporal conditions, we tried to observe other factors that can have some effect in the embedded tense option, namely those factors related to reporting speaker‟s degrees of commitment to the reported contents. We have chosen parliamentary debate context and the results from the examples analysed here (from CRPC corpus) have shown that in fact tense option seems to be closely linked to the relation between speakers and contents.