Modal meanings of the morpheme -ra in the secular Galician-Portuguese liric

Abstract

In this paper we analyze data from the Galician-Portuguese secular lyric regarding the uses of morpheme -ra in past time axis, considering their modal functions, such as conjunctive past, conditional past, volitive past and closer past to the speech time, and investigate the effects of the type of lyric song, lexical token and the polarity to configure the modal contexts. Thus, our data come from the Tesouro Medieval Informatizado da Língua Galega and the project Edição, Atualização e Preservação do Património Literário Medieval Português. The results show a higher modal frequency of -ra in love songs, especially in the conditional, volitive and conjunctive functions by binding to love secrets as opposed to scorn and bad comments, which exhibit a more direct style. In relation to lexical analysis, our results indicate that modal verbs stand out in the volitive function, whereas in other functions predominate state, cognitive and sensitive verbs, as opposed to the action and process verbs, which are more used in the temporal functions. Furthermore, there are more uses of the modal -ra in contexts of positive polarity that means a balance between cognition and coding tasks: the expression of unreality or distance from reality by -ra is less frequent, therefore more marked than -ra with temporal function, but is codified in more frequent contexts (affirmatives), therefore less marked. From this analysis results the observation that in the modal uses of -ra, we can allude to unreality, regardless of the affirmative or negative statement.