Word
A carteira, deves entregá-la nos perdidos e achados.
Meaning
The wallet, you must hand it in at the lost and found.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of A carteira, deves entregá-la nos perdidos e achados.
em
in / on / at
dever
should / ought to
a carteira
the wallet
-lo
it / him (m) [-la, -los, -las]
Questions & Answers about A carteira, deves entregá-la nos perdidos e achados.
Why is there a -la on the verb when we already established that we are talking about A carteira at the beginning?
This sentence uses left-dislocation. We moved the direct object (A carteira) to the front for emphasis. When you pull an object to the front like this in Portuguese, you must leave a placeholder pronoun behind in the verb phrase. This "resumptive" pronoun is -la, which points right back to the wallet.
If the verb is entregar and the pronoun for the wallet is a, why is it spelled entregá-la?
When an object pronoun like a attaches to a verb ending in -r, -s, or -z, you drop that final consonant and add an L to the pronoun. Dropping the -r from entregar changes how the word is read, so we must add an acute accent to the a to keep the spoken stress on the final syllable of the verb.
What would this sentence look like if we didn't move A carteira to the front?
Using standard word order, it would be Deves entregar a carteira nos perdidos e achados. Notice that the pronoun -la disappears completely because the direct object is back in its normal position after the verb phrase.
Why is it nos before perdidos e achados?