The Prosodic Word in European Portuguese (review)

Marina Vigário has contributed a well-written piece of research work based on her revised dissertation to the field of phonology. She has achieved her goals of advancing our understanding of major issues in the phonology of European Portuguese, as well as relating her findings from the language to theories of phonology.

The book is composed of eight chapters and two appendices. Ch. 1 presents theoretical background essential to the investigation (1–39). Ch. 2 is an extensive review of previous studies on the phonological word of European Portuguese (41–62), while Ch. 3 discusses eighteen phonological phenomena observed in European Portuguese (63–126). In Ch. 4, V addresses the grammatical status, affix vs. clitic, of stressless pronouns (127–55). Chs. 5 (157–214) and 6 (215–72) concern the theme of the investigation—the (simple) prosodic word with prosodization of stressless affixes and clitics in the former and compound prosodic words, including stressed affixes, different kinds of compounds, and abbreviations and so on, in the latter. Ch. 7 turns to the reduction of clitics (273–324). Finally, Ch. 8 (325–41) concludes the book with a recapitulation of main findings.

V claims that this monograph is the first full-length study of the prosodic word of European Portuguese. Although the book focuses on a refined variety of Portuguese, one that is spoken by educated Lisboners between the ages of twenty and forty, its typological approach makes frequent references to a number of languages (from Romance, Germanic, and other families), which enrich the text with intriguing examples beyond European Portuguese.

The organization of the phonology of European Portuguese is said to consist of five domains, ranging from the top level to the bottom: utterance, intonational phrase, phonological phrase, prosodic word, and syllable. Since many phonological rules in the language are sensitive to the domain of prosodic word, numerous otherwise puzzling phonological phenomena become explainable straightforwardly in terms of prosodic word. Recognition of prosodic word, the level distinction of phonological rules (lexical vs. postlexical) and identification of clitics are important not only to the phonology of European Portuguese, as shown convincingly in the book, but also instrumental in understanding the morphophonology of human languages generally. It is regrettable that such fundamental linguistic concepts are embedded merely in specific theories.

Designed as an empirical study, Ch. 7 presents an interesting study of clitic reduction in European Portuguese. However, corpora generated by as few as three speakers are too small in scale, especially when the speaker is considered to be a potential factor affecting the reduction process. The inclusion of this chapter appears to be a digression from the theme of the monograph, since clitic reduction has little bearing on the prosodic word. The organization of the book would be more compact without this chapter.