Abstract
This study aims to provide a survey of periphrastic aspectual constructions in contemporary European Portuguese. The main problem, according to the author, consists in the fundamentally different conceptions of aspect and the nature of verbal action in Czech and Portuguese.
Given that the grammatical category of aspect has different contents in Czech and Portuguese, it is preferable to use the term aspectuality as a three-layer system of interacting categories of aspect, telicity, and the nature of verbal action. If the traditional Slavic aspect is to be expressed in Portuguese by other means at various levels of construction, Czech lacks a way to render the variety of meanings of Portuguese periphrastic constructions that represent the different categories of the nature of verbal action (Aktionsart).
In the study, aspectuality in Portuguese is considered a system of mutually correlated categories - aspect, the nature of verbal action, and the lexical semantics of the verb. The author here understands periphrastic constructions as being combinations of a verb and a nonfinite verb form or combinations of a verb and a noun.
A further distinction consists in discerning between infinitive, gerundial, and participial verbal periphrases. Basically, it is reasonable to say that if the first verb is an auxiliary (morphemic - bearing the grammar categories of tense, aspect, person, and number), the second acts as a semanteme (bearing meaning)..
Periphrasic constructions are divided here according to their aspectual meaning into three basic groups: ingressive periphrases (including sub-groups rendering imminent, dispositive, initial, and inceptive meaning); global or partial durative periphrases (including sub-groups rendering actual, retrospective, prospective, continuative, persistent, and distributive meaning); and terminative periphrases (rendering cessative, egressive, conclusive, finite, and consummative meaning).