A pluperfect portrait from 1887 to 2012

ABSTRACT Under the Sociofuncionalist approach, we deal in this article with simple and compound pluperfect in historical journals of the Institute of Ceará from 1887 to 2012, with a textual length of fifteen thousand pages approximately. We detected 6,238 occurrences distributed in six functions: past before another past, past before a speech reference, discursive past, desiderative, subjunctive and conditional. Of these, the past before another past was investigated in variationist perspective, being the simple form conditioned, on a recurrent way, by discursive third-person and absence of verbal modifier. Also motivate the simple form the factors ephemerides, irregular verb and coordinate clause.