Agreement and government

Two forces hold the Portuguese sentence together. Agreement (concordância) forces certain words to copy the grammatical features — gender, number, person — of others: the adjective matches the noun, the verb matches the subject. Government (regência) governs the reverse relation: it is the head word — a verb, a noun, an adjective — that demands a complement and often dictates the preposition by which it is introduced. To master both is to master much of the language’s syntax.

Nominal agreement

The noun imposes its gender and number on the elements that accompany it: articles, adjectives, determiners, numerals and participles. The general rule is simple and regular.

Difficulties arise with multiple heads. When a single adjective qualifies two or more nouns, it may agree with the whole set (going plural, and masculine if the genders are mixed) or only with the nearest noun:

Some elements have rules of their own. The adjective anexo (“attached”) and the participle incluso agree with the noun (as fotografias anexas); but meio, when it means “somewhat”, stays invariable: ela está meio cansada (“she is rather tired”), as against meia garrafa (“half a bottle”).

Verbal agreement

The verb agrees in number and person with its subject. A compound subject preceding the verb takes the plural: o pai e o filho chegaram (“the father and the son arrived”). Several contexts call for care.

• Postposed subject: Chegaram o pai e o filho keeps the plural, but a compound subject summed up by a pronoun (tudo, “everything”) may take the singular.
• Relative pronoun que: the verb agrees with the antecedent — fui eu que paguei (“it was I who paid”), not que pagou.
• Collective nouns: a maioria dos alunos faltou (“most of the students were absent”), singular, is the norm; the plural (faltaram) is tolerated when individual plurality is foregrounded.
• Passive se: with a plural subject the verb goes plural — vendem-se casas (“houses for sale”), not vende-se casas.

Verbal government: the verb and its preposition

Many verbs are completed only through a fixed preposition, and the choice is not free — it is part of the verb’s very identity. Assistir, meaning “to be present at”, governs a (assistir a um espetáculo); gostar (“to like”) governs de; obedecer (“to obey”) governs a. The same verb may switch government with its meaning:

Verb	Government	Meaning
assistir	a something	to attend, be present at
assistir	(direct object)	to assist (assistir um doente)
aspirar	something	to breathe in
aspirar	a something	to aspire to
implicar	something	to entail (isto implica mudanças)
implicar	com someone	to pick on

The preposition carries with it the usual contractions (a + o = ao, de

• a = da), and shapes the pronouns: with verbs governing a, the clitic is lhe(s) (obedeço-lhe, “I obey him”); with direct government it is o, a, os, as (vejo-o, “I see him”).

Nominal and adjectival government

Verbs are not the only governors. Many nouns and adjectives inherit the preposition of the verb they derive from, or fix it by usage: o respeito por alguém (“respect for someone”), favorável a (“favourable to”), ávido de (“eager for”), alheio a (“oblivious to”).

The verb haver and other impersonals

In the sense “there is / there are”, haver is impersonal: it has no subject and always stays singular, even with a plural complement — havia muitos livros (“there were many books”), houve problemas (“there were problems”). The same holds for fazer marking elapsed time: faz dois anos (“two years ago”), not fazem dois anos.

Why it matters

Agreement and government are where grammar becomes visible in careful writing: a mismatched adjective or a wrong preposition (*namorar com for namorar, “to date”) gives itself away at once. They are not ornament but the mesh that binds words into a coherent sentence — and thus the ground on which the educated standard most firmly asserts itself.