Word
O cansaço crónico acaba de afetá-lo.
Meaning
Chronic tiredness has just affected him.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of O cansaço crónico acaba de afetá-lo.
acabar de
to have just (done something)
o cansaço
the tiredness
crónico
chronic
afetar
to affect
Questions & Answers about O cansaço crónico acaba de afetá-lo.
Why does afetar change to afetá-lo with an accent and an -lo?
When attaching a direct object pronoun like o to a verb ending in -r, you drop that final consonant and change the pronoun to -lo. Because dropping the -r from afetar changes the natural stress rules, we must add an acute accent to keep the phonetic stress on the final a, resulting in afetá-lo.
The translation says "has just affected", but acaba is in the present tense. Why not use a past tense?
The expression acabar de followed by an infinitive is a set structure meaning "to have just done" something. Even though English uses the present perfect ("has just..."), Portuguese uses the present tense of acabar to show that the action concluded mere moments ago in relation to the present.
Could the pronoun go before the verb instead, like acaba de o afetar?
Yes! In European Portuguese, it is very common to place the pronoun before the infinitive in this structure, making acaba de o afetar perfectly natural. Attaching it to the end of the infinitive as afetá-lo is equally correct but can sound slightly more formal in everyday speech.
Why isn't the subjunctive used in this sentence, given the current lesson?