Mesoclisis

Mesoclisis is the placement of an unstressed personal pronoun inside the verb, lodged between the stem and the ending. It does not happen with just any verb form: it occurs only in the future indicative and the conditional (future-of-the-past), and it yields forms that look startling at first sight — dar-te-ei, far-se-ia, amá-lo-emos. It is one of the most distinctive traits of careful European Portuguese and, at the same time, a living fossil of the language’s history.

An inheritance from the periphrastic future

Mesoclisis only makes sense in the light of where the Romance future and conditional come from. In Classical Latin the future was a dedicated synthetic form (cantabo “I shall sing”). In Vulgar Latin that form collapsed and was replaced by a periphrasis: the infinitive followed by the present tense of habēre “to have”. Thus cantare habeo — literally “I have to sing” — gave cantarei; and the infinitive followed by the imperfect of habēre, cantare habēbam, gave the conditional cantaria.

The decisive point is that the two parts were originally separate words, and other elements — pronouns above all — could be slotted between them. What we now feel to be a single verb form was, strictly, cantar + (h)ei. Mesoclisis is the memory of that separability: the pronoun still occupies the slot that historically belonged to it, between the infinitive and the rest of the ending.

This is why the verb’s internal seam is always sharp. In dar-te-ei, dar is the old infinitive and -ei is the relic of hei “I have”; the pronoun te simply fills the space that already lay between them.

In medieval and classical texts this separability was even more visible: the pronoun was interposed with great freedom, and spelling itself wavered between dar-te-hei, with the etymological h of haver, and the already-contracted form. The orthographic reform of 1911 fixed the dropping of that h, giving the modern spelling dar-te-ei. Mesoclisis is thus the last stronghold of an old verbal syntax that, everywhere else in the system, long ago hardened into simple forms.

When it occurs: the rule

Mesoclisis is not a free stylistic choice: it falls out of the general rules of clitic placement. The core idea is simple.

In the future and the conditional, Portuguese does not allow enclisis (one cannot say *darei-te, *faria-se). So whenever nothing forces the pronoun to come before the verb, it is drawn inside it — and we get mesoclisis. It is, in effect, the only enclisis these two tenses permit.

When, however, an attracting word precedes the verb, the pronoun is pulled forward (proclisis) and mesoclisis disappears. Among the attractors are:

• negators — não, nunca, jamais, ninguém, nada: não te darei “I will not give you”;
• subordinating conjunctions — que, quando, se, porque, embora: disse que me telefonaria “she said she would phone me”;
• certain adverbs — já, sempre, só, talvez, também: talvez se arrependa “perhaps he will regret it”;
• interrogative and relative pronouns and adverbs — quem, que, onde: a pessoa que me ajudaria “the person who would help me”.

The form: hyphens and stem changes

In writing, mesoclisis joins the three pieces with hyphens: stem + pronoun + ending. But fusing the pronoun to the stem sometimes triggers the same phonetic and spelling changes seen in enclisis.

When the pronoun is o, a, os, as and the stem ends in -r, that -r drops and the pronoun takes the form -lo, -la, -los, -las; the stem’s final vowel may take a written accent. Thus amar + o (in the future) gives amá-lo-ei, and fazer + o gives fá-lo-ei. The verbs dizer, fazer, trazer and their compounds also have contracted future stems — dir-, far-, trar- — and it is these that enter the mesoclitic form.

Verb + pronoun	Mesoclitic form	Pronunciation
amar + o (fut.)	*amá-lo-ei*	ɐˈma lu ˈɐj
fazer + se (cond.)	*far-se-ia*	ˈfaɾ sɨ ˈi.ɐ
dizer + te (fut.)	*dir-te-ei*	ˈdiɾ tɨ ˈɐj
dar + lho (fut.)	*dar-lho-ei*	ˈdaɾ ʎu ˈɐj

The ending that follows the pronoun is the ordinary ending of the tense: -ei, -ás, -á, -emos, -eis, -ão in the future; -ia, -ias, -ia, -íamos, -íeis, -iam in the conditional. In practice, then, the mesoclitic form of a verb is obtained by prising open the simple form and inserting the pronoun into its inner seam.

Conjugation with a clitic

Set out in full, the regularity of the pattern becomes plain. The pronoun stays fixed in the centre while the ending runs through the six persons.

eu	dar-te-ei
tu	dar-te-ás
ele/ela	dar-te-á
nós	dar-te-emos
vós	dar-te-eis
eles/elas	dar-te-ão

eu	far-se-ia
tu	far-se-ias
ele/ela	far-se-ia
nós	far-se-íamos
vós	far-se-íeis
eles/elas	far-se-iam

Combined clitics

Mesoclisis also accommodates combined pronouns, in which an indirect object (me, te, lhe, nos, vos) merges with a direct one (o, a, os, as) to give mo, to, lho, no-lo, vo-lo and their feminines and plurals. Dropped into the verb’s seam, the cluster produces forms of remarkable density.

These constructions, today almost confined to literary or legal prose, show how far the mechanism can be pushed while remaining fully grammatical.

Register and vitality

Mesoclisis is grammatically obligatory in the contexts described, but it belongs above all to the written and formal language. In everyday European speech, a speaker tends to avoid it, recasting the sentence so as to bring in an attractor (eu logo te direi “I’ll tell you presently” instead of dir-te-ei) or falling back on a periphrasis with ir “to go” (vou dizer-te “I’m going to tell you”). Even so, it remains alive in the press, in institutional discourse and in good prose, and is felt as a mark of care and correctness.

To master mesoclisis, then, is not to memorise exceptions but to grasp a single principle: in these two tenses the pronoun can only go before the verb or inside it. When nothing summons it forward, it settles within — exactly where, a thousand years ago, it always stood.