文 Section 06
Grammar
From gender to the subjunctive, from the personal infinitive to mesoclisis.
25 articles
Grammar overview
A map of European Portuguese grammar — from parts of speech to the verb, from pronouns to syntax — and a guide to the articles in this section.
Word classes
The categories into which Portuguese words are sorted — noun, verb, adjective and the rest — the criteria that define them, and the reorganisation proposed by the Dicionário Terminológico.
The noun and grammatical gender
The noun and the category of gender in Portuguese: masculine and feminine, the morphology that marks them, single-form nouns, and the cases in which gender changes the meaning.
The Plural
How Portuguese forms the plural of nouns and adjectives — from the general -s rule to consonantal plurals, nouns in -l, and the famous threefold fate of -ão (-ões, -ães, -ãos).
Articles and contractions
The definite and indefinite article in Portuguese, its agreement in gender and number, and the system of preposition + article contractions (do, na, pelo, ao, à) that shapes both the written and the spoken language.
Adjectives
How the adjective agrees in gender and number, where it sits in relation to the noun, and how it expresses degrees of comparison in European Portuguese.
Personal pronouns
The Portuguese system of personal pronouns — subject forms, unstressed object forms (direct and indirect) and the stressed forms used after a preposition.
Clitic Placement
Where to place unstressed object pronouns in European Portuguese — the default enclisis, the proclisis triggered by attractor words, and the rare mesoclisis of the future and conditional.
Mesoclisis
The placement of an unstressed pronoun inside the verb, between the stem and the future or conditional ending — dar-te-ei, far-se-ia — a hallmark of educated European Portuguese.
Forms of address
How Portuguese chooses between tu, você, o senhor and vós to address a listener — the axis of closeness and respect, the verb agreement involved, and the avoidance strategies of European Portuguese.
Demonstratives and possessives
The two systems that anchor speech in space and person — the three-way deixis of the demonstratives (este/esse/aquele) and a possession (meu/teu/seu) that agrees with the object, not the owner.
Numerals
The numerals of Portuguese — cardinals, ordinals, multiplicatives and fractionals — with their variable forms, gender agreement, and European specifics such as mil milhões and dezasseis.
The verbal system
The three conjugations of Portuguese and their architecture of moods, tenses and non-finite forms — including the personal infinitive and the future subjunctive, features that set the language apart among the Romance tongues.
The subjunctive mood
The mood of the desirable, the hypothetical and the not-yet-real — the present, imperfect and future subjunctive, their compound tenses, and the contexts that summon them in European Portuguese.
The Personal Infinitive
The inflected infinitive — a verb form that, in a rarity among the world's languages, conjugates the infinitive for person and number. It is one of Portuguese's signatures.
Non-finite verb forms
The infinitive, gerund and participle — the verb forms with no marking for person or mood — and European Portuguese's preference for "estar a + infinitive" where Brazil uses the gerund.
Irregular verbs
The verbs that escape the model of the three conjugations — the strong preterites inherited from Latin, the suppletion of ser and ir, the stem alternations, and the high-frequency irregulars.
Ser, estar and ficar
Portuguese splits the copula three ways — essence (ser), circumstance (estar) and change (ficar) — a trio of linking verbs that encodes aspect grammatically.
Prepositions and contractions
The prepositions of Portuguese, the government that binds them to verbs, nouns and adjectives, and the dense system of contractions with articles, demonstratives and pronouns that marks the language.
Conjunctions and adverbs
The words that join and modify — coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, the classes of adverbs, the -mente formation, and the role both play as connectors of discourse.
Agreement and government
How words adjust to one another — nominal and verbal agreement — and how verbs and nouns demand their prepositions — government — with the cases that cause the most hesitation.
The passive voice
Portuguese's two passives — the analytic one (ser + participle, with the agent introduced by "por") and the pronominal one with "se" — and the agreement each demands.
Negation and interrogation
How Portuguese negates — with the particle não, negative concord, and words such as nunca, nada and ninguém — and how it forms questions, through intonation, the é que particle and interrogative words.
Syntax and Word Order
Constituent order and clause structure in Portuguese — an SVO, head-initial language whose word order is governed less by rigid rules than by information structure, inversion and clitics.
Grammatical differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese
The syntactic divergences that most separate European from Brazilian Portuguese: the gerund, clitic placement, the você system of address, and prepositional government.