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.
Keywords: pluperfect; Sociofuncionalism; panchronic approach; historical journals