Portuguese Grammar
The morphology and syntax of
the Portuguese language, is similar to the grammar of most other Romance
languages — especially Galician and the other languages of Iberian
Peninsula. It is a synthetic, fusional language.
Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and articles are moderately
inflected: there are two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers
(singular and plural), diminutive and augmentative inflections, and
a superlative inflection for adjectives. The case system of Latin has
been lost, but personal pronouns are still declined (with three main
types of forms, subject, object of verb, and object of preposition).
Adjectives usually follow the noun.
Verbs are highly inflected: there are three tenses
(past, present, future), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative),
three aspects (perfective, imperfective, and progressive), two voices
(active and passive), and an inflected infinitive. Most perfect and
imperfect tenses are synthetic, totaling 11 conjugational paradigms,
while all progressive tenses and passive constructions are periphrastic.
As in other Romance languages, there is also an impersonal passive construction,
with the agent replaced by an indefinite pronoun. Portuguese is basically
an SVO language, although SOV syntax may occur with a few object pronouns,
and word order is generally not as rigid as in English. It is a null
subject language, with a tendency to drop object pronouns as well, in
colloquial varieties. It has two copular verbs.
Sources: Wikipedia,
Terra, Sonia-Portuguese,
own materials.
