The verbal system

In Portuguese the verb is the morphologically richest word class: a single root can yield more than fifty distinct forms, crossing person, number, tense, mood, aspect and voice. This inflectional density, inherited from Latin and largely preserved, makes the verbal system the core of the language’s grammar — and its most demanding part for the learner.

The three conjugations

Every regular verb belongs to one of three conjugations, identified by the theme vowel of the infinitive:

Conjugation	Ending	Theme vowel	Model verbs
1st	-ar	-a-	amar, cantar, falar
2nd	-er	-e-	vender, comer, bater
3rd	-ir	-i-	partir, sair, abrir

The first conjugation is by far the largest and the only truly productive one: new verbs almost always enter through it (clicar “to click”, reciclar “to recycle”, googlar “to google”). Standing apart from the scheme is pôr “to put” and its compounds (compor, dispor, supor), a relic of the older poer that the tradition places in the second conjugation.

The make-up of a verb form

Each inflected form can be broken down into as many as four parts: the stem (which carries the meaning), the theme vowel, the tense-mood suffix and the number-person suffix.

This regularity is what lets any new verb be conjugated by analogy — and what makes the irregular verbs so conspicuous, those in which the stem or the suffixes depart from the model (ser, ir, fazer, dizer, trazer).

The moods

Mood expresses the speaker’s stance towards what is being said. Portuguese distinguishes three:

• Indicative — the mood of the real and the asserted: ela chega hoje “she arrives today”.
• Subjunctive (conjuntivo) — the mood of the hypothetical, the wished-for and the subordinate: espero que ela chegue “I hope she comes”.
• Imperative — the mood of commands and requests: chega cedo! “arrive early!”

Portuguese grammatical tradition still treats the conditional (chegaria “would arrive”) as an indicative tense, the futuro do pretérito, rather than a mood of its own.

The tenses

Within the indicative there is a present and three past tenses — the preterite (cantei “I sang”, a completed act), the imperfect (cantava “I was singing / used to sing”, durative or habitual past) and the pluperfect (cantara “I had sung”, anterior to another past) — alongside a future and a conditional. The subjunctive has a present, an imperfect and, a striking feature of Portuguese, a living and everyday future:

The non-finite forms

Three forms escape inflection for person and tense and bring the verb close to the noun, the adjective and the adverb:

• the infinitive (partir “to leave”), the name of the action;
• the gerund (partindo “leaving”), adverbial and durative in value;
• the participle (partido “left, gone”), adjectival in value and the basis of the compound tenses and the passive.

Portuguese stands out among the Romance languages in possessing, beside the impersonal infinitive, a personal (or inflected) infinitive that agrees with its subject:

eu	partir
tu	partires
ele/ela	partir
nós	partirmos
vós	partirdes
eles/elas	partirem

Thanks to it, an infinitive clause can carry its own explicit subject: é melhor saíres agora “it is better that you leave now”, antes de eles chegarem “before they arrive”.

Simple and compound tenses

Beside the simple forms, Portuguese builds compound tenses with the auxiliary ter (more rarely haver) plus a participle: tenho cantado, tinha cantado, terei cantado. Note that the compound present perfect does not match the English present perfect: tenho cantado expresses an action repeated or sustained up to the present, not a single finished event.

Why this map matters

Knowing the overall plan of the system — three conjugations, three moods, a fan of tenses and three non-finite forms — is what lets each detailed article be placed: the subjunctive mood, the personal infinitive, the non-finite forms and the irregular verbs that put all this regularity to the test.