Uses of imperfect past tense and teaching of Brazilian Portuguese as a foreign language

Abstract

This article analyzes the Imperfect Past Tense (Pretérito Imperfeito – PI) of Brazilian Portuguese language through a descriptivelinguistics view, considering the verbal categories of tenses and aspect. We inquire, as well, the uses of PI listed by Brazilian’s Portuguese books as a foreign language (PBLE). According to studies about Imperfect Past Tense, there is a split between its characteristics of external (verbal tense category) and internal timing (aspect tense category). The last one concerns to the fact in which Imperfect Past Tense does not demonstrate an end of the narrated actions, as the other concerns to the evidence in which past tense is related to the verbal tense. During Imperfect Past Tense, the narrated events happen before the enunciation. In the undertaken analyzes at this study, it is possible to verify that the Imperfect Past Tense is in fact related to two different mentioned categories and it has been observed that this grammatical tense indicates four different meanings: (i) past regularity; (ii) past description; (iii) past situation which includes one or more events; (iv) situations which occurred concomitantly. As the PBLE textbooks have been observed, it has been noticed that the uses of Imperfect Past Tense are descriptively wrong, making no relation to the reality. The objective of this paper is to suggest reflections that contributes to the PBLE material production.

Keywords: Brazilian Portuguese as a second language, imperfect past tense, verbal tense, verbal aspect.