ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the results of a study of morphologically marked future form use in the educated spoken Portuguese of 1970s Rio de Janeiro. The patterning of social predictors showed that there was an age-based trend where the Morphological Future was vanishing from use with half of all informants using the Periphrastic Future categorically. The patterning of linguistic predictors showed that the Morphological Future, when retained, is primarily used with third-person subjects and high frequency verbs in semantic contexts of decreased certainty of the event occurring. The role of individual variation in the study of future forms is also discussed.
