Clitics And More Second Person

From a reader learning Portuguese, I received an email containing a few doubts regarding language usage:

Hi! I'm mexican and I found this page helpful for those learning Romance Languages. I've been learning portuguese by my own without the necessity of assisting to classes. I don't know if this is the right place where I can ask doubts. Anyway, in Brazilian Portuguese, when you talk to a friend you talk to him informally obviously. But for example, I heard a sentence saying "Nao vem falar dos seus problemas que nao vou ouvir". The sentence is in informal form but the word "Seu" can also go accompanied with the informal??

The answer is yes. First of all, I refer the reader to my article Second Person in Portuguese, which deals with this exact matter and more.
Now, let's take a look at the sentence by parts. The first part, Não vem falar, is a negative imperative which, as you can see in Charts 7A and 7B of the article mentioned, uses the form of the second-person affirmative imperative. Prescriptively, the correct form should be Não venha falar, following the third-person morphology of você, the standard form of general address in Brazil; however, as I say in the article, in certain situations, some Brazilians maintain the formal/familiar distinction by using the prescriptive form in a more formal manner, while introducing forms from the second person in a rather familiar way. This is so that you have Vem falar in the affirmative, and Não vem falar in the negative, both following second-person morphology, even though this latter form in the negative should be standardly Não venhas falar, a construction not ordinary colloquially in Brazil.
Now, regarding whether seu, as in seus problemas, is used with familiar forms, the answer is again yes. Like I wrote: [a] sentence with teu may be followed by one with seu or vice versa, e.g. Não me diga que este não é seu carro. Ela já me disse que é teu. That is, the possessive generally used is indeed seu, even in familiar usage; again, unless it is a formal context, seu will always be perceived as "yours (sg)", e.g. Ele tem seu carro, in general speech, will always mean "He has your car", whereas "He has his car" would be Ele tem o carro dele [See De Nosotros]. However, for instance, in the same sentence sent to me, teus could have just as well been used, and no one would have noted anything out of the ordinary because this is exactly how the admixture of second- and third-person forms occurs, i.e. the sentence then being Não vem falar dos teus problemas que não vou ouvir.

The second part of the email reads:

And also there is another little doubt. Let's say that someone is carrying something and falls from his hands. In Spanish you would say "se me cayó" if you are the one that threw it, "se te cayó" if you are the witness, etc. In portuguese would be the same?: "Se me caiu", "Se te caiu", etc.

That construction is not truly found in Brazil. In Portugal, it is possible to hear caiu-se-me or caiu-se-te, but is not as frequently used as in Spanish. In Brazil, that particular Spanish construction of the type se + ind. obj. pron. (i.e. se me, se nos, se les, etc), will normally be rendered in a non-reflexive way, shifting the indirect object to occupy the subject position. For instance, the phrase in Spanish, using the construction in question, se me cayó la caja would have the gramatically correct equivalent in Portuguese caiu-se-me a caixa, which, as I say above, could be found in Portugal, especially in more formal situations, though in Brazil it would most likely be rendered as a caixa caiu or even eu deixei cair a caixa. This is something Spanish speakers must get used to because Spanish possesses rich usages of pronoun clitics, with multiple ones ocurring frequently. On the other hand, Brazilian Portuguese tries to use the least number of clitics possible to convey the intended meaning. Let's a compare a few sample discourses and their equivalents:

Spanish	Portuguese
-¿Se comió la sopa? -Sí, se la comió.	-Ele comeu a sopa? -Sim, comeu.
-¿Dónde está tu libro? -Se me perdió.	-Onde está seu livro? -Eu perdi ele.

As you can see, Spanish makes a more complex use of clitics, while Portuguese gets rid of all, or as many as it can. In the first example, in Spanish we have as a response "himself it he-ate" (i.e. He ate it), using the object pronoun plus reflexive se with the verb "to eat". In the Portuguese example, for the same response, we have "he-ate" (i.e. He ate it), with an empty object, a very common practice in Brazil, where all object and reflexive pronouns are displaced, with the verb by itself sufficing, in constructions where we would expect a series of clitics. Another possibility, as I have discussed it before, is to use what traditionally are subject pronouns as object ones, as in the second example: Eu perdi ele for more traditional Eu o perdi. The Spanish construction, se me perdió, literally "itself to-me it-lost" (I lost it), is difficult to translate into English as it is, and so the indirect object must become the subject, as it happens in the Portuguese rendition; and even though its equivalent perdeu-se-me is gramatically correct, it would be hard to find it in Brazil. My advice to my reader: if you find yourself in, say, a supermarket in Brazil, and you drop your box of cheeses, and you suddenly yell out "A caixa caiu-se-me!", be ready to receive some weird looks, and you might be even be sent to the 'pedantry' aisle. An interesting observation here is that if you speak Portuguese following the European standard, and hence speak it with a European accent (like I do), you are expected to use this kind of intricate constructions regarding the clitics; thus, if you are in this position, and say something like A caixa caiu-se-me, you won't get the same reaction than if you speak the language following the Brazilian standard, because it is known that clitic pronouns are used differently in each country (i.e. Portugal and Brazil), especially in colloquial registers.

The reader ends his email by saying:

I think that would be all and please let me know if I can refer to you again if I have any other doubt. Thank you! David M.

Absolutely. Anyone with any language doubts about the Romance languages, feel free to contact me with them, and if I find them proper and my time permits it, I will gladly attempt to answer them in Romanika.