The Phonology of Portuguese (review)

Authored by two Portuguese phonologists, this book presents a detailed description of the phonology of Portuguese, cast mainly in the framework of feature geometry and lexical phonology. The book is organized into seven chapters. Ch. 1 provides a general introduction to Portuguese phonology, including orthography and a brief history of Portuguese (1–9). Chs. 2 (10–37) and 3 (38–64) study the phonological system of the language. The former concerns segmental phonology, providing feature charts for the consonant and vowel systems of Portuguese, while the latter focuses on the structure of the syllable and syllabification in Portuguese. Chs. 4 (65–87) and 5 (88–108) deal with inflection and derivation, respectively, in the morphology of Portuguese. Ch. 6 discusses word stress and related issues in Portuguese (109–28). Finally, Ch. 7 addresses major phonological processes such as nasalization and reduction of unstressed vowels (129–48).

The book deals with fundamental issues in the phonology of Portuguese, from segmental to suprasegmental, covering the inventory of consonants and vowels, the realization of glides, the formation and structure of the syllable, and the generation of lexical stress. Further, readers are informed of a number of phonological phenomena in Portuguese such as feature dependence of coronal fricatives, vowel harmony in certain verb forms, and centralization as a general process of vowel reduction. Because phonology is a domain sensitive to regional variation, Mateus and d’Andrade’s discussion, while concentrating on European Portuguese, has thankfully paid due attention to phonological differences found in Brazilian Portuguese.

In spite of its title, about a third of the content (two out of seven chapters) concerns the morphology of Portuguese. This is justifiable, however, given the interface between phonology and morphology in the language. The authors’ description of the inflectional morphology of Portuguese is rather extensive, ranging from gender and number inflection in nouns and adjectives to tense and agreement inflection in verbs. The chapter on derivational morphology, in contrast, only addresses affixes that induce special phonological patterns during the derivational process. Rich in data and examples, the overall description of the phonology and morphology of Portuguese presented in the book is quite adequate.

A main problem with the text, however, lies in some of the analyses. A coda-restriction rule has limited consonants permissible at the coda to /l/, /r/, and /s/. Presumably because of this, the authors hypothesize that consonant clusters such as those in admirar ‘to admire’ and óbvio ‘obvious’ must have resulted from deletion of ‘empty nuclei’ between two consonants. Nonetheless, there is no independent evidence supporting the place of such empty nuclei in the phonological system of Portuguese. Alternatively, such word-medial consonant clusters can easily be redistributed into different syllables when the coda-restriction rule is modified.