Аннотация:This article investigates the semantics of Portuguese past tenses, focusing on their indexical behavior. I show that under certain circumstances, even when they are used anaphorically and refer to a contextually salient interval, these past tense heads can denote intervals that do not precede the speech time. I argue that the best way to capture this behavior is to construe its presupposition as a shiftable indexical (Schlenker 2003; Anand 2006), with a meaning roughly paraphrasable as ‘earlier than τ(c)’, with τ(c) being set to some context (attitude-like) time, not necessarily the speech time. I also argue that non-anaphoric uses of the Portuguese verb form called Pretérito Perfeito should be analyzed as present tense + perfect aspect combinations, as was suggested in Giorgi & Pianesi (1998). In particular, I show that Portuguese instantiates what is called double-access readings in past under past configurations that mimic the more well-known cases involving embedded present tenses in attitudinal contexts (Ogihara 1996; Abusch 1997, inter alia).
