You may have heard me say before that Portuguese is a Null-Subject Language. But what does that mean? This means that Portuguese grammar allows us to create a full sentence without an explicit subject (doer) even though it follows the SVO sequence. This is not possible in English as we always need to include who is doing the action.
Take the verb “to have”.
If I want to say “I have a car” in English I have to include “I”, otherwise we don’t have a full sentence.
But in Portuguese this is possible. I can say “tenho um carro” without having to include “eu” (I)
“Tenho” only belongs to the grammatical person “I”.
“you have a car” is “tens um carro”. Here again, it’s possible for me to say this without having to include “tu”* seeing as “tens” only belongs to the grammatical person “you”.
*Tu is the informal form of address.
Moreover, a null-subject language also allows for the subject personal pronouns in Portuguese to be dropped anytime the subject is inferred from the context. These Personal pronouns are only used:
- in a single stand-alone statement;
- the first sentence in a succession of statements about the same person;
- and/or for emphasis.
For instance, if you want to say “I’m going to work early because I have lots of work today” you could say:
“eu vou trabalhar mais cedo porque tenho muito trabalho hoje” – including “I” in the first part of the sentence.
or
“vou trabalhar mais cedo porque tenho muito trabalho hoje” – without saying “I” in either parts of the sentence.
But in Portuguese, you would almost never say
“Eu vou trabalhar mais cedo porque eu tenho muito trabalho hoje” unless you were emphacising the “I“.
But if you’re not emphasising the subject, using the subject personal pronoun in every sentence, renders it repetitive and redundant. If you said “After I read my book, I’m going to call my sister” including the “eu” both times in Portuguese, it is almost like saying in English:
“after I I read my book I I‘m going to call my sister”
As you can see this makes the sentence sound a little awkward or unnatural sounding.
In conclusion, because the subject can and is dropped most of the time, the verbs are highly inflected to reflect the doers in the verbs themselves. This is why there are so many conjugations in Portuguese. A single verb can have over 50 different forms. Read more about Subject Personal Pronouns in Portuguese here.