Preface

Abstract

When I was asked by the editors of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics to act as the guest-editor of a special phonology issue, I decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to show to the international linguistic community how lively and sparkling the field of Portuguese phonology has become, with the rise of a new generation of young and promising researchers, Brazilian and Portuguese alike. Although more variants of Portuguese are currently spoken around the globe than the ones represented by the studies published in this volume, it is undeniable that the main centers of phonological research are nowadays located in Portugal and Brazil, undoubtedly encouraged by the inspiring example of forever-young scholars like Maria Helena Mira Mateus, Lida Bisol, and Ernesto d’Andrade. Admittedly, the four Portuguese and five Brazilian linguists that present their work here are not the only ones that could have been asked to contribute to this special issue. Limitations of space made a selection unavoidable. On the other hand, the group that was chosen to participate is without doubt representative of a much larger contingent of young researchers that are devoting their attention and scrutiny to the study of the sound structure of Portuguese. The contributors to this volume are representative not only because they belong to an upcoming generation of promising phonologists, but also because their contributions deal with a wide variety of phonological subjects, addressing theoretical issues as well as analytic alternatives by exploiting all of the available empirical domains, including adult data, acquisition data, sociolinguistic variation, and geographic variation.