Temporal clauses with conditional value in legal language (contrastive study)

Abstract

This study is a summary of a qualitative and quantitative linguistic investigation of the Portuguese and Brazilian Penal Code, and contains important results pertaining to the temporal clauses introduced by the connector quando. We focused on its semantic conditional features, suggesting the name pseudo-temporal clauses for these hypotactic constructions and observe the relation between the occurrence of different verbal modes and the semantic interpretation. We verify, in both the texts, the temporal clauses introduced by quando have an evident conditional value. On the other side, the compared texts are different regarding the selection of the verbal mode. The Portuguese Penal Code preferred, evidently, the subjunctive mode and in the Brazilian one the indicative mode. We explained this divergence by semantic and pragmatic factors.