We establish new results concerning the existence and asymptotic behaviour of solutions for the nonlinear elliptic problem where (p)u=div(|delta u|(p2)delta u), with 1<p<N, denotes the p-Laplacian operator and f: (N)x(0,) is a suitable continuous function. The principal aim of this article is to study the case 0<l<, because the extreme cases l=0 and l= have been intensely studied in recent years. The main tools we use to prove the principal results are the method of lower and upper solutions, an argument of penalization and a technique of monotonizationregularization of the nonlinearity f.