The text provides a thorough discussion of relevant issues in general and computational linguistics, while at the same time offering a fresh and empirically motivated view on Portuguese grammar. Morphology, syntax and semantics are treated, as well as a number of practical applications, covering corpus annotation, grammar teaching and machine translation. All chapters are richly embroidered with examples, graphics and statistics, and a gentle progression of topics makes the book accessible to a wide range of linguistically interested readers.

With a colourful and international collection of academic degrees from the faculties of Medicine and Arts, Eckhard Bick has a solid foundation in both natural science and the humanities, and a refreshingly creative urge to apply methodology from the one discipline to matters of the other. As a linguist and researcher he leads the cross-language VISL project (http: //visl.hum.sdu.dk) which applies the 'Palavras' model of automatic grammatical analysis to a number of other languages, creating internet based electronic lexica, corpora, parsers and language teaching tools.