Grammar 文 · 03
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.
enThe noun (Portuguese substantivo or nome) is the word class that names beings, things, qualities, actions and notions — gato “cat”, mesa “table”, bondade “kindness”, corrida “race”, saudade “longing”. In Portuguese every noun carries a grammatical gender, either masculine or feminine: there is no neuter. That gender is an inherent property of the word, and it governs the form of everything that accompanies it — articles, adjectives, demonstratives, possessives and participles.
A grammatical gender, not always natural
Grammatical gender must be kept apart from biological sex. For nouns naming people and animals the two usually coincide (o homem “the man”, a mulher “the woman”; o cavalo “the stallion”, a égua “the mare”). But most nouns denote things that have no sex, and their gender is purely conventional: we say a mesa “the table” and o livro “the book” with nothing in the object to justify it. Neighbouring languages assign different genders to the same notions — a árvore “the tree” is feminine in Portuguese but masculine in French (l’arbre).
The present system is a simplification of the three genders of Latin. The neuter disappeared: most of its nouns passed to the masculine, but neuter plurals in -A, felt as feminine singulars, yielded a few feminine collective nouns — thus folha “leaf” (from FOLIA, the plural of FOLIUM) and lenha “firewood” (from LIGNA).
How gender is marked
The most regular contrast is the pair -o / -a: final -o tends to be masculine, -a feminine. This is the pattern of two-gender nouns, where the feminine is built from the masculine.
o menino → a menina · o gato → a gata · o professor → a professora · o ator → a atriz
‘boy → girl, (male) cat → (female) cat, (male) teacher → (female) teacher, actor → actress’ — the feminine may change the vowel, add -a, or use a special suffix.
The ending is, however, an unreliable guide. Many masculines end in -a — especially Greek loanwords in -ma: o problema “the problem”, o tema “the theme”, o sistema “the system”, o clima “the climate” — alongside o dia “the day”, o mapa “the map”, o planeta “the planet”. Conversely, a tribo “the tribe”, a foto “the photo” and -ão nouns such as a mão “the hand” and a razão “the reason” are feminine. The gender of each word is ultimately learned together with the article that goes with it.
Single-form nouns
Not every noun has a masculine/feminine pair. The grammatical tradition recognises three cases.
| Type | Behaviour | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Common gender | one form; gender shown by the article | *o/a estudante* ‘student’, *o/a colega* ‘colleague’, *o/a artista* ‘artist’ |
| Sobrecomum | a single fixed grammatical gender for both sexes | *a criança* ‘child’, *a vítima* ‘victim’, *a testemunha* ‘witness’, *o cônjuge* ‘spouse’ |
| Epicene | one gender; sex specified with *macho* / *fêmea* | *a cobra* ‘snake’, *o jacaré* ‘cayman’, *a águia* ‘eagle’, *o polvo* ‘octopus’ |
In common-gender nouns only the article (or another determiner) shows the gender: o colega / a colega. In sobrecomum (“overcommon”) nouns the gender is fixed and does not track the person’s sex: a vítima is always feminine, even of a man. In epicene nouns (Portuguese epiceno) — almost always animal names — a single form serves both sexes, which are specified with macho “male” or fêmea “female”.
When gender changes the meaning
Some pairs of homonyms differ only in gender, with distinct meanings. Here the choice of article is no longer indifferent: it changes the word.
| Masculine | Feminine |
|---|---|
| o capital (capital, funds) | a capital (capital city) |
| o cabeça (the head, the leader) | a cabeça (the head, body part) |
| o guia (the guide; the guidebook) | a guia (the docket; the rail) |
| o rádio (radio set; bone; element) | a rádio (radio station) |
| o moral (morale, spirits) | a moral (ethics; the moral) |
| o cólera (the disease, cholera) | a cólera (anger, wrath) |
O exército avançou sobre a capital, mas faltava-lhe o capital para sustentar a campanha.
‘The army advanced on the capital, but it lacked the capital to sustain the campaign.’ One sound sequence, two opposite senses, told apart only by gender.
Nouns that trip you up
Certain nouns have a gender that runs against many speakers’ intuition and is worth committing to memory. Masculine are o eclipse “eclipse”, o telefonema “phone call”, o estratagema “stratagem”, o dó “pity”, o champô “shampoo” and o grama (the unit of mass). Feminine are a alface “lettuce”, a omoplata “shoulder blade”, a cal “lime”, a sentinela “sentry” and a personagem “character”. Hesitating between o and a with these nouns is one of the commonest mistakes in educated usage.
Agreement
A noun’s gender does not stand alone: it spreads to everything that agrees with it. Articles, adjectives, demonstratives, possessives, ordinal numerals and past participles all adapt their form to the gender (and number) of the noun they refer to.
As velhas casas brancas foram restauradas.
[ɐʒ ˈvɛʎɐʃ ˈkazɐʃ ˈbɾɐ̃kɐʃ]
‘The old white houses were restored.’ Article, adjectives and participle all take the feminine plural of casa.
When one adjective qualifies several nouns of different genders, the norm lets the masculine plural prevail: o pai e a mãe estão cansados “the father and mother are tired”. This is why grammatical gender, far from being a point of etiquette, is a central mechanism of Portuguese syntax: getting a noun’s gender wrong drags the error through the whole sentence.
Sources
- Nova Gramática do Português Contemporâneo . Edições João Sá da Costa (1984)
- Gramática da Língua Portuguesa . Caminho (2003)
- Gramática do Português . Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (2013)