Word
O meu melhor amigo ficou chateado por não terem retribuído o gesto.
Meaning
My best friend got annoyed for them not having reciprocated the gesture.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of O meu melhor amigo ficou chateado por não terem retribuído o gesto.
não
not / no
o amigo
the friend (m)
ter
to have
meu
my (m/f/pl: meu, minha, meus, minhas)
Questions & Answers about O meu melhor amigo ficou chateado por não terem retribuído o gesto.
Why do we use terem retribuído instead of a regular past tense verb?
This is the Perfect Personal Infinitive. We use it after prepositions like por to talk about a completed past action. Because the people who didn't reciprocate ("they") are different from the person who got annoyed ("my best friend"), we have to conjugate the helping verb ter for "they", giving us terem. Then we add the past participle retribuído to mean "having reciprocated".
Could we use porque instead of por in this sentence?
Yes, but the grammar would change. Por is a preposition, which is why it triggers the use of the infinitive phrase terem retribuído. If you used the conjunction porque (because), you would use a regular conjugated past tense instead: porque não retribuíram o gesto (because they didn't reciprocate the gesture).
Why use ficou instead of foi or estava for "got annoyed"?
Why is the word não placed before terem rather than between the verbs?