Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the phonology of Italian. It covers the different levels of analysis from individual sounds up to the phrasal level. It focuses on the most widely dispersed features of the language reflecting its significant regional and social variation and its most prominent regionally restricted patterns.Martin Krämer provides a critical survey of the generative literature on Italian phonology. He reports on current debates in the field, considers their particular and general theoretical interest, and provides both syntheses and original analyses. His accounts of the main aspects and characteristics of Italian phonology are couched in the framework of Optimality Theory, but he keeps formal aspects and theory-internal matters to a minimum and separate from the presentation and descriptionof the data. His exposition is thus fully accessible to students and researchers who are not familiar with or do not subscribe to the tenets of the theory. Individual chapters may thus serve as starting points for in-depth investigations into particular aspects of Italian phonology in whatever frameworkthe reader chooses to employ.The Phonology of Italian is the first fully comprehensive account of its subject for many years. It will interest scholars and advanced students of Italian, Romance phonology, and phonology as a system.