Portuguese Subject Matter Knowledge
Scope of the domain
The Portuguese (32) subject matter domain assesses Portuguese as a linguistic system and as a cultural product: phonology and spelling, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics, dialect variation between Brazilian and European Portuguese, and interpretation of literary and cultural texts from the Lusophone world.
Core rules
- Nasalization: the tilde and the spellings -ão, -ãe, -õe mark nasal vowels and diphthongs (pão, irmã, põe); final -am and -em are also nasal.
- Vowel quality: the acute accent marks open vowels (avó, sede 'thirst'), the circumflex marks closed ones (avô, sede 'seat'), and the tilde marks nasality (maçã).
- Crase: à is the preposition a plus the article a, used only before a feminine noun that takes the article: Vou à praia; Vou a Portugal; Entreguei o livro à Maria but a ela.
- Clitic placement: proclisis is triggered by negatives, adverbs, subordinators, and interrogatives (Não me disse; Quando me viu); enclisis appears in affirmative main clauses and is standard in European Portuguese (Disse-me); mesoclisis occurs in future and conditional forms (Dir-te-ei).
- Brazil vs. Portugal: Brazilian Portuguese prefers estou falando and a gente with a third-person singular verb; European Portuguese prefers estou a falar and enclisis.
Worked example
Se eu tivesse tempo, iria à festa. The if-clause uses the imperfect subjunctive (tivesse) for a hypothetical condition, and the main clause uses the future of the preterite (iria). For a real future condition, Portuguese uses the future subjunctive: Se eu tiver tempo, irei à festa. Se eu teria is ungrammatical in either reading.
Traps
Watch false friends (atualmente = currently, realizar = to carry out, esquisito = odd), the four spellings porque/por que/porquê/por quê, há vs. a for elapsed time, ter vs. haver as existentials, and switching between Brazilian and European forms inside one passage.