PROGRESSIVES IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

Using recently collected data, this paper presents a new analysis of the process of grammaticalization of the periphrasis referred to as estar + gerúndio, in Brazilian Portuguese. This periphrasis is morphologically equivalent to the English progressive be +gerund, but its usage is somewhat different. Aside from semantic differences, there is an interesting morph-syntactic distinction in the comparison between the Brazilian estar + gerúndio and the English be + gerund, in that the contracted auxiliary verb may be pronounced as a clitic not to the verb subject, but to the gerund. The main goal of this paper is to show that such a cliticization (Heine 1993, Heine et al. 1991) is variable. It may or may not occur, when the auxiliary estar is pronounced in its phonetically reduced version. Furthermore, there is a correlation between the phonetic reduction of the auxiliary and the insertion of other syntactic elements (such as adverbials) between estar and the gerund