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.

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.

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.

Grammatical gender and number have been studied from a variety of theoretical viewpoints and still there is no commonly established and well-defined view on the nature of the two categories. The term ‘gender’ is used for a range of grammatical phenomena, including noun-classification into corresponding inflection classes and syntactically conditioned rules of agreement and concord. Like grammatical gender, grammatical number can be realized through inflection on the noun and/or through the agreement that it triggers on other items. However, unlike grammatical gender, grammatical number has stable, straightforward and systematic interpretive effects, related to the quantity of the predicate denoted by the noun, and hence also of the referent when the nominal expression is referential. Number and gender are core features of nouns and make up or participate in some of the hallmark properties of natural language.