The subject matter of the dissertation is the prosodic word. It bears on the organization of grammar and phonology, its interface with morphology and syntax, and the nature of phonological representations. Despite the reference to various other languages, it primarily focuses on European Portuguese (EP).A major result of this research is the identification of the phonological properties that constitute clear diagnostics for the prosodic word domain in EP and those that identify phonologically deficient units (clitics). As to the former, it is concluded that the prosodic word is richly cued in EP. Among the identified diagnostics for the prosodic word are: (i) many phonological processes (e.g. lowering in final stressless syllables closed by sonorant, final non-back vowel deletion, initial r-strengthening, initial vowel feature specification; (ii) prominence phenomena (e.g. word primary stress, secondary initial stress, focal stress); (iii) tonal phenomena (e.g. pitch accent assignment and distribution); (iv) phonotactic restrictions; and (v) constituent deletion processes (e.g. deletion under identity and clipping). Unlike in many other languages, such as German and English (Hall 1999b, Raffelsiefen 1999, EP prosodic words are not subject to a minimal size and do not bound resyllabification. As

In this article, a prosodic domain located between the prosodic word and the phonological phrase is argued for (the prosodic word group -PWG). This constituent groups the members of several types of compound-like expressions, but does not play a special part in the prosodic organization of clitics, and thus is argued to be (partially) distinct from the old clitic group (Hayes 1989;Nespor and Vogel 1986 (Ladd 1996(Ladd /2008Frota 2000).

Although European and Brazilian Portuguese have long been considered to belong to different rhythmic types, no clear support for this distinction has been given. In agreement with recent proposals for other languages, this paper presents an account of Portuguese rhythm based on acoustic measures of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and explores the relation between these measures and the phonological properties specific to the European and Brazilian varieties (EP and BP). The approach followed is both successful in providing evidence for the rhythmic distinction between the two varieties and in relating it to the traditional rhythm typology. Overall, the results show that EP and BP have clearly distinct mixed rhythms: stress-and syllable-timing characterise EP, whereas syllable and mora-timing characterise BP. The data further suggest that mixed rhythm is not equivalent to intermediate rhythm, thus supporting the notion of rhythmic classes against the scattering of languages along a rhythmic continuum.

The ability to distinguish phonetic variations in speech that are relevant to meaning is essential for infants' language development. Previous studies into the acquisition of prosodic categories have focused on lexical stress, lexical pitch accent, or lexical tone. However, very little is known about the developmental course of infants' perception of linguistic intonation. In this study, we investigate infants' perception of the correlates of the statement/yes-no question contrast in a language that marks this sentence type distinction only by prosodic means, European Portuguese (EP). Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, EP-learning infants at 5-6 and 8-9 months were able to successfully discriminate segmentally varied, single-prosodic word intonational phrases presented with statement or yes-no question intonation, demonstrating that they are sensitive to the prosodic cues marking this distinction as early as 5 months and maintain this sensitivity throughout the first year. These results suggest the presence of precocious discrimination abilities for intonation across segmental variation, similarly to previous reports for lexical pitch accent, but unlike previous findings for word stress.