«Você» and «senhora doutora»: two candidates, four wrong answers
A reading text set in a Lisbon faculty: a nineteen-year-old student asks a sixty-year-old professor «Você pode explicar-me outra vez?», and the narration notes that the professor «respondeu com secura». Later a receptionist asks «A senhora doutora deseja esperar?». Item 5 asks what the use of «você» reveals about the student's relationship with the professor; item 6 asks whom the receptionist is addressing. Two candidates lose all the marks on both items. Candidate 1, who prepared with Brazilian materials, writes that «você» is «a forma culta e respeitosa, equivalente a usted» and that «doutora» can only mean a medical doctor. Candidate 2 writes that «você» expresses intimacy and that «senhora doutora» is sarcastic. The teacher has one forty-five-minute session before the next mock and a group of twelve, four of whom are Brazilian-Portuguese speakers from an exchange programme.
1. Why does a Lisbon professor hear «Você pode explicar-me outra vez?» as rude, and what does «respondeu com secura» add?
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In European Portuguese the polite default towards a superior is o senhor / a senhora, or a title, with a third-person verb: «O senhor professor pode explicar-me outra vez?». Você is a middle form - not intimate like tu, not respectful like o senhor. Addressed to an older professor it can sound over-familiar and, more often, faintly condescending, since it places the addressee in a category the speaker does not quite respect. That is why «respondeu com secura» is not decoration: it is the text's evidence for how the form was heard, and it is the element a candidate must quote to justify the answer. Candidate 1's reading fails because in Brazil você is the unmarked neutral pronoun and carries none of that charge - the transfer is grammatical and sociolinguistic at once. Teach the triangle: tu for solidarity, o senhor / a senhora for distance and respect, você as the awkward middle.
2. Item 6: who is «a senhora doutora»? Correct both candidates.
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The receptionist addresses a woman entitled to the title of doutora: in Portugal doutor / doutora is used for holders of a doctorate and, by tradition, for physicians, lawyers and other university-trained professionals. «Senhora doutora» is the full deferential formula, the title alone being enough once the conversation is under way.
Candidate 1 is wrong twice: você is not the respectful form in Portugal, and doutora is not restricted to medicine. Candidate 2 is wrong twice as well: você is not intimacy here, and «senhora doutora» is standard deference, not sarcasm. Both score zero on both items, with no partial credit, because each item tests a single contrast and each answer inverts it. Flag the second transfer trap for the four exchange students: in Brazil doutor / doutora circulates much more loosely as a general honorific, so a Brazilian-pattern reading of the title is as risky as a Brazilian reading of the pronoun.
3. Design the 45-minute session. What do the four Brazilian-Portuguese speakers contribute, and what should they not be asked to do?
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Structure: ten minutes building a pronoun grid with the class - person, verb form, typical addressee, connotation - filled by the students, not dictated; fifteen minutes on the two items, using «respondeu com secura» as the textual evidence; ten minutes on titles (doutor, engenheiro, professor) and on any cultural reference the same text carries; ten minutes rewriting, moving three sentences from você to o senhor / a senhora, then three others into a Brazilian context where você is the correct neutral form.
The four Brazilian speakers are a resource for the contrast, not informants on European norms, and they must not be told their Portuguese is wrong: the exam tests European Portuguese and the lesson is register variation, not correctness. Ask them instead to describe what você does in their own variety and who uses it to whom - that makes the contrast explicit for everyone and keeps the classroom from turning into a correction of one group by another.