This special issue of the CJL grew out of a workshop that took place at the UAB in the summer of 2017. The declared goal of the event was to reconsider the questions that motivate Generative Grammar and the answers given thus far, the crossroads that its practitioners must navigate, and the challenges they face given the current state of the field. These are the issues addressed by the papers collected here.

The articles that make up this volume deal with a variety of issues related to primary and secondary stress assignment, including the interaction of stress with sonority, vowel changes in Latin, stress shift in verb+clitic groups, the role of stress in truncation and loanword adaptation, and stress location in prominence augmentation strategies.

Interest in clitics originates probably from their special character. As elements which are neither words nor affixes but share some of their properties, they are an especially fruitful ground to test grammatical theories. Such properties include phonological shape, allomorphy, cooccurence restrictions, position in the sentence, and semantic interpretation, thus covering a wide range of phenomena that affect all grammatical components. It is not at all clear whether the notion «clitic» corresponds to some linguistic primitive (or several), although some clitic-related categories, like clitic group as a prosodic category, have been proposed. The general properties of what has been classified as a clitic also varies, depending on the language and the specific clitic analyzed.

The papers collected in this volume are concerned with a wide range of topics which reflect the work that is being conducted at present in this field. They have been written by specialists who devote their current work to describing the intonational systems of Romance languages and to discussing some of the theoretical questions posed in intonational phonology. I trust the volume will contribute to broaden the empirical and theoretical studies of prosody within the Romance area and will spark further interest and inquiry into the area of intonational phonology.

This volume studies perfect constructions across languages and pays special attention to perfectivity and its relation to the perfect. The issue aims to explore the relation between telicity/perfectivity and the perfect, some points of contrast between the perfect and (im)perfective markers, temporal readings of the perfect and its different degrees of remoteness, the existence of the aoristic drift, present tense lengthening in the perfect, among other topics linked to both notions.