Inho - Personal Pronouns and Possessives

Personal Pronouns and Possessives

Pronouns are often inflected for gender and number, although many have irregular inflections.

Personal pronouns are inflected according to their syntactic role. They have three main types of forms: for the subject, for the object of a verb, and for the object of a preposition. In the third person, a distinction is also made between simple direct objects, simple indirect objects, and reflexive objects.

Possessive pronouns are identical to possessive adjectives. As in other Romance languages, they are inflected to agree with the gender of the possessed being or object.

There are drastic differences in personal pronoun usage and forms between EP and BP, especially in spoken BP. Some of the more notable differences:

• Spoken BP tends to reduce or eliminate the use of the familiar second-singular tu in favor of você; even when forms of tu are used, they generally co-occur with third-singular verbs.
• Correspondingly, original third-person possessive forms seu/sua shift to mean "your", while postposed dele/dela (literally "of him/her") are co-opted as third-person possessives.
• Colloquially, first-plural verb forms are often substituted by the pseudo-pronominal a gente (originally "the people"), along with third-singular verbs.
• These above changes tend to trigger a much stronger use of subject pronouns in non-emphatic contexts (i.e. BP is moving away from being a null-subject language).
• Unstressed object pronouns are always placed before the verb in BP, while in EP they often come after the verb (or even in the middle of a verb), with various associated phonological adjustments.
• Unstressed third-person object pronouns (o/a/os/as) hardly occur in BP (eu tenho "I have it"; eu vi or eu vi ela "I saw her").