"Meu marido vai comer com o pai dele hoje."
Translation:My husband will eat with his father today.
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Are "ir + infinitive" and future tense interchangeable? Is there any temporal or stylistic differentiation?
What determines that the sentence says "o pai dele" rather than "seu pai"?
Seu pai has many translations = his,her,your,their father. O pai dele is only his father.
You could say it to anyone, refering to the receptor's father, not the father of the husband, as Paulenrique wrote
If you mean that the husband will eat with the husband's own father, would you normally say "com seu pai"? But if there are two men involved and the Marido is going to eat with another man's father, then you would have to say "com o pai dele." Assuming that the other man has been mentioned already as an antecedent. Is that right? English is more ambiguous and depends on context. Example: "Do you know the president? " "No, but my husband is dining with his father today." Could you use "seu" in this sentence?
yes, can you use seu in your last example. In Portuguese it is ambiguous too! So, you have to find a way out in order to clarify the meaning :-) but don't worry, the listener may ask you who is who because he will not understand at first!
Then it's pretty much like English, except if you specified in the last sentence using "o pai dele," would it be clearer to the hearer that I mean the president's father?
not really. Dele literally means "of him" (here "the father of his"). So it is related to a man (he). In your example we had two men, so we can't distinct to whom "his" is being referred without further context :S
Shouldn't ira (w/accent on a) be used as future tense instead of "vai" (present tense)?
Come on Duolingo, you won't accept, " My husband is going to eat with his father today."!!! It's the future. It's a very common way of expressing the future where "going to" is substituted for "will".
