Re: Portuguese futures

Quoting Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>:

> Hi!
>
> Haggen Kennedy writes:
> > Douglas Koller wrote:
> > > From: "Dr. Peter E. Tarlow" <tourism@...>
> > >
> > >> The more common forms are:
> > >
> > >> Vou vê-lo
> > >> Eu o verei
> > >> Vejo-o
> > >> O vejo (Brazil only)
> > >  I'm glad you qualified the last one, because I was
> >  > under the impression that this was strictly verboten
> >
> > 	Actually it is. :) Prescriptive grammar strictly forbids its
> > usage, ...
>
> Well, I (and probably quite some linguists) would regard only *usage*
> as the definition of what is allowed.  Prescriptive grammars do not
> describe what the language *is* like, but what the scholars think it
> *should* be like.  But linguistically speaking, that's often much less
> relevant.
>
> In this respect, I sometimes envy minority languages in often not
> having such scholars. :-)))
I've sometimes wondered whether dangling prepositions would have attracted so
much prescriptivist resistance if the Ancients had given them a name without
syntactic implications.

But back to Portuguese: nothing that has been said on its future construction
seems to me to rule out its analysis as infinitive+clitic verb, but maybe I've
missed something?

 Andreas