Although over 100 million people on various continents use Portuguese as their major language, the academic community in the United States has almost totally neglected the study of Portuguese linguistics. Romance Linguistics links the formal linguistic study of Portuguese with the social contaxt in which language is used. These studies, which cover a wide range of topics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and discourse, comprise some of the best recent work on Portuguese.

Many of the chapters challenge parts of widely recognized theoretical models of language, such as Chomsky's, while others support existing theories or linguistic concepts.