Sentence Types: Final Review

This page closes the Sentences group by pulling everything together. After working through declaratives, questions, commands, negation, word order, and the existential and impersonal constructions one at a time, the goal now is to be able to look at any Brazilian Portuguese sentence and classify it along two independent axes at once: its structure (how many clauses it contains) and its function (what it does — state, ask, command, exclaim). Once both axes are second nature, you can parse and produce sentences you have never seen before.

Two questions, always

Every BR sentence answers two separate questions, and confusing them is the single most common source of analytical errors.

1. Structure — How many clauses? Simple (one), compound (two or more coordinated), or complex (a main clause plus one or more subordinate clauses).
2. Function — What is the speaker doing? Declarative (stating), interrogative (asking), imperative (commanding), or exclamative (exclaiming). Negation cuts across all four.

These axes are orthogonal. A question can be simple or complex; a command can be a single word or a multi-clause monster. English works exactly the same way, so the framework transfers cleanly — what differs is the machinery BR uses to build each type.

Axis 1: Structure

Simple sentences

One subject-predicate core, one finite verb. See simple sentences.

Compound sentences

Two or more independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction (e, mas, ou, então) — neither depends on the other. See compound sentences.

Complex sentences

A main clause plus at least one subordinate clause that cannot stand alone. The subordinate clause is where BR deploys its heavy artillery — the subjunctive and the personal infinitive. See complex sentences.

Here assim que eu chegar is a temporal clause, and chegar is in the future subjunctive — a tense English simply does not have. English uses a bare present ("as soon as I get home"); BR marks the hypothetical-future status of the action morphologically. That morphological richness is the real story of BR complex sentences: English subordinates with word order and a thin set of tenses, while BR subordinates with a full mood system on top of word order.

Axis 2: Function

Declarative

The default. States a fact or opinion. Word order is typically SVO, but BR allows considerable reshuffling for emphasis (see Axis 3). See declarative sentences.

Interrogative

BR builds questions in several ways, and crucially does not invert the subject and verb the way English does.

• Yes/no questions rely on intonation alone — the word order stays identical to the statement. See yes/no questions.

• Wh-questions front the question word but, in everyday BR, often leave the rest of the sentence in statement order. See wh-questions.

• Embedded / indirect questions tuck a question inside a larger sentence; the embedded clause reverts to statement order and uses no question mark of its own. See embedded questions.

Notice that the embedded question keeps como esse aplicativo funciona (statement order), never como funciona esse aplicativo in the inverted English sense. English speakers routinely over-invert here; BR resists it.

Imperative

Commands, requests, instructions. The affirmative imperative borrows from the você subjunctive form in standard BR, but colloquial speech frequently just uses the bare present indicative. The negative imperative always uses the subjunctive. See imperative sentences.

The first uses the colloquial tu-style bare form fecha (extremely common in BR even when addressing a você); the second uses the subjunctive esqueça... except note it is rendered colloquially as esquece. In careful or written BR you would see Não se esqueça de me avisar. This gap between the prescriptive subjunctive imperative and the colloquial indicative is a defining feature of spoken BR — flag it as register, not error.

Exclamative

Expresses strong feeling. BR uses que + noun/adjective, como, quanto, or simple intonation. See exclamatory sentences.

Negation crosses every function

Negation is not a fifth sentence type — it is a layer you add to any of the four. Basic negation puts não before the verb, and BR famously allows (indeed requires) double negation with negative words like nada, ninguém, nunca. See negative sentences.

To an English speaker this looks like a "double negative" error, but in BR não... ninguém is the grammatically correct and only natural form. Eu vi ninguém is ungrammatical.

Axis 3: BR-specific flexibilities

This is where BR diverges most sharply from English, and where the Sentences group has spent the most effort. Four features recur:

Pro-drop (subject omission)

Because the verb ending identifies the subject, BR routinely omits subject pronouns. See word order flexibility.

No eu anywhere — the -ei and -ô endings carry the "I". English has no equivalent; "Just got here" sounds like a clipped note, whereas in BR this is fully natural speech. (Note: BR is less radically pro-drop than European Portuguese in the third person, because você and a gente can be ambiguous, but first-person drop is everywhere.)

VS order (subject after verb)

With verbs of appearance, existence, and happening, BR happily places the subject after the verb. See subject inversion.

English forces "A problem came up" (SV) or a "there"-construction; BR can lead with the verb and let the subject follow, which also signals that the subject is new information.

Existential tem (invariable)

For "there is / there are", colloquial BR overwhelmingly uses invariable tem — it does not agree in number, unlike English "is/are" or even the formal Portuguese há. See existential sentences and there is / there are.

Tem stays tem whether one thing or a thousand exist. The formal written equivalent is Há muitos restaurantes..., and the bookish Existem muitos... does agree. Choosing among tem / há / existe is a register decision, not a grammar one.

No dummy "it"

English requires a placeholder subject for weather, time, and impersonal statements ("It is raining", "It is hard to say"). BR has no dummy subject at all. See impersonal sentences and it-constructions.

There is no word for "it" in either sentence. The verb simply stands alone (tá chovendo) or the clause itself is the logical subject (é difícil dizer...). Anglophones reflexively reach for a translation of "it" and produce errors like Ele está chovendo.

The decision map

To classify or build any BR sentence, run it through this map:

1. What is it doing? Stating → declarative. Asking → interrogative (then: yes/no, wh, or embedded?). Telling someone to act → imperative. Expressing strong feeling → exclamative.
2. Is it negated? If yes, place não before the verb and remember double negation with nada/ninguém/nunca.
3. How many clauses? One → simple. Two coordinated → compound. Main + subordinate → complex (and now check: does the subordinate clause trigger the subjunctive or a personal infinitive?).
4. Any BR flexibility in play? Dropped subject? Verb before subject? Existential tem? A missing "it" or "there"? Confirm none of them is an English calque.

Annotated practice paragraph

Here is a natural, mixed paragraph. Each sentence is tagged by structure + function so you can see the framework applied.

Simple · exclamative. No verb at all — que + noun (correria, "rush, hustle") plus the interjection nossa. BR exclamatives often dispense with verbs entirely.

Compound · declarative. Two coordinated clauses joined by e; subject eu dropped in both (pro-drop), recoverable from -ei.

Complex · interrogative. Main clause Você sabe + embedded yes/no question se ainda tem ingresso. Note invariable existential tem inside the embedded clause, and statement word order after se.

Complex · declarative (negated). Double negation (não... ninguém); the relative clause que goste takes the subjunctive because the antecedent is negated and therefore non-specific — pure BR mood machinery with no English counterpart.

Complex · imperative. Colloquial imperative me liga (proclitic me, bare indicative form) + temporal clause with the future subjunctive chegar + the tag tá? turning it into a softened request.

Common Mistakes

These errors come from importing English sentence machinery directly into BR.

Key Takeaways

When the function is a question or command and the structure is complex, the BR-specific mood tools — the future subjunctive in temporal clauses, the subjunctive after negated antecedents, the personal infinitive — do the work English handles with bare tenses. Those tools are covered in depth in complex sentences.