A2 (Elementary)Lesson 9: Basic Clause Patterns & Everyday Usage
A1 told you that Brazil says tem for "there is". Here is the part that was left out: an existential sentence has no subject at all, so the verb never goes plural — Tem uma cadeira and Tem vinte cadeiras use the very same word. Há is the written twin, frozen in exactly the same way, and existir is the odd one out that does agree: Existem duas farmácias aqui.
An existential sentence has no subject, so the verb never goes plural
Tem uma cadeira and Tem vinte cadeiras use the same word — ✗ têm vinte cadeiras is the possessive verb
há is the written twin of tem: Há uma farmácia na praça (there is a pharmacy on the square)
The past of há is houve, and it stays singular: houve dois problemas, never ✗ houveram
existir is the one that does agree: Existem duas farmácias aqui (there are two pharmacies here)
Past: teve is what you say, houve is what you read
Future: leave the verb in the present — Amanhã tem jogo (there's a match tomorrow)
Não tem ninguém em casa (there's nobody home) · Tem troco? (have you got change?)
tem / há + noun, third person singular, no subject, never plural · existir agrees: existe / existem · past: teve (spoken) · houve (written) · possessive ter still agrees: eles têm
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This is the sentence you will build most often in Brazil and the one that gives you away fastest. Ask for a toilet, a table, change, bread, a seat on the bus, and every one of those comes out as an existential. The trap is that it looks like the ter you already know, so English speakers keep hunting for a subject and then make the verb plural to match the thing they can see — and têm vinte cadeiras quietly turns "there are twenty chairs" into "they own twenty chairs". Once you accept that nobody is doing anything in these sentences, the whole family — tem, há, teve, houve — becomes one frozen word you never have to conjugate again.
You already use tem for "there is". What nobody says at A1 is why it behaves so strangely: an existential sentence has no subject. Nobody is doing any having. The verb simply sits there in the third person singular and announces that something is around.
Tem uma padaria na esquina. (There's a bakery on the corner.)
Tem muita gente na fila. (There are a lot of people in the queue.)
Tem banheiro aqui? (Is there a toilet here?)
Put it beside the ter you learned first and the difference is obvious: A Ana tem uma padaria has a subject — Ana — and says she owns the place. Take the subject away and the same verb stops meaning "own" and starts meaning "exist".
"Tem um ponto de ônibus na esquina." (There's a bus stop on the corner.)
"Tem três farmácias nessa rua." (There are three pharmacies on this street.)
"Tem alguém na porta." (There's someone at the door.)
"Não tem lugar no carro." (There's no room in the car.)
"Há uma reunião marcada para as dez." (There is a meeting set for ten o'clock.)
"Há muitos brasileiros morando em Portugal." (There are many Brazilians living in Portugal.)
"Houve dois shows na cidade no sábado." (There were two concerts in town on Saturday.)
"Existem várias formas de chegar lá." (There are several ways of getting there.)
The two jobs live in the same verb, so watch for the subject. Eles têm dois filhos. (They have two children.) has a subject and takes the plural têm, with its circumflex. Tem dois filhos na sala. (There are two children in the room.) has no subject and stays singular. Same four letters, two completely different sentences.
Tem and há put something on the table for the first time, so what follows is normally indefinite: Tem um livro na mesa. (There's a book on the table.) Once the thing is already known, the existential is the wrong tool: ✗ Tem o livro na mesa → O livro está na mesa. (The book is on the table.)
Several everyday expressions are existentials that stopped being sentences: Não tem problema. (No problem.) · Não tem jeito. (There's nothing to be done.) · Não tem mais. (There's none left.) Nobody parses these; they are just said.
Teve and houve will carry you, but spoken Brazil leans on the imperfect — tinha and havia — for describing how things were: that tense arrives at B1, and until then teve and houve cover everything you need.
Brazil's most-mocked line of poetry is an existential tinha. In July 1928 the Revista de Antropofagia printed Carlos Drummond de Andrade's No meio do caminho, built on the refrain no meio do caminho tinha uma pedra — the everyday existential where school grammar wanted havia — and the ridicule followed him for decades, reaching as far as his job in the civil service. Drummond kept every clipping and in 1967 published the entire quarrel as a book, Uma pedra no meio do caminho: biografia de um poema. Sources: Instituto Moreira Salles — Elvia Bezerra, Migalhas — Gramatigalhas, José Maria da Costa
Existential ter is not modern sloppiness — it is about five hundred years old. Dinah Callou and Juanito Avelar traced ter and haver through written Portuguese from the thirteenth century to the twentieth and found existential ter rising steadily the whole way, with its first appearances back in the sixteenth century. What feels like a Brazilian shortcut is a change that has simply been running longer than Brazil has been a country. Sources: Gragoatá (UFF) — Callou & Avelar, 2000, Domínios de Lingu@gem (UFU) — Vitório, 2013
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