Martin Krämer (2009). The phonology of Italian. (The Phonology of the World’s Languages.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xii+286.

This book provides theoretical linguists and readers within the broader linguistic community with an analysis of the main aspects of contemporary Italian phonology. * It is divided into seven chapters, the first three of which provide the reader with a theoretical background and an overview of the history of the language. The subsequent chapters present a discussion of segmental processes such as velar palatalisation, the feature system of Italian, syllable phonotactics, stress placement and processes above the word level. The theo-retical framework adopted in this book is Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), for it is very well suited to the analysis of variation. The theory of segmental features used in the analysis of the segment inventory and segmental processes assumes a version of Morén’s (2003) Parallel Structures Model of feature geometry. The book forms part of the publisher’s The Phonology of the World’s Languages series, whose specific goal is to provide a systematic understanding of the phonology of a language. The wealth of topics discussed in the book goe