Acknowledgements

This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral dissertation, which was accepted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne (Philosophische Fakultät der Universität zu Köln) in May 2021. It would not have been possible to write it without the support of many people. In the following, I name some of them.

First of all, I thank Prof. Dr. Martin Becker, who had the idea of a comparative study of the Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect, supported me and invited me to join the Tense and Aspect in Discourse project, where I had the opportunity to develop my work as a contribution to collaborative research.

I thank Prof. Dr. Benjamin Meisnitzer, for introducing me to the fascinating field of Romance linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in 2014 and for very early on pushing my academic career by integrating me into academic networks that I would not have been part of without him.

I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Marco García García. Together with Prof. Dr. Petra Schumacher, Prof. Dr. Christiane Bongartz and apl. Prof. Dr. Doris Mücke, he led the a.r.t.e.s. class 8 Prominence in Language, which has been a great platform of academic exchange and a great source of motivation, especially in times of the pandemic, which the writing process of this book fell in.

This work was supported financially by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), CRC 1252 Prominence in Language (Project-ID 281511265). The project was led by Prof. Dr. Klaus von Heusinger and equipped with an inspiring scientific spirit. Being part of a group of 19 doctoral candidates, I had the chance to receive training in data management and statistical analysis in R, outstandingly taught by Dr. Bodo Winter, which provided me with a range of new perspectives.

I am obliged to my colleagues Jakob Egetenmeyer for his help and advice, Paul Compensis for advice and discussion regarding the study design of the experiment, Maximilian Hörl for statistical consultancy, Nuria Martínez García and Diego Romero Heredero for help with the Spanish items included in the experiment, as well as Frank Zickenheiner for introducing me to the art of typesetting in Latex. Furthermore, I am very thankful to Thomas Batchelor for proofreading.

Last but not least, I am grateful to the John Benjamins Publishing Company for publishing this book, i.e. to Prof. Dr. Elly van Gelderen, who accepted it for the Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today series, two anonymous reviewers for their feedback, as well as Kees Vaes, who managed the publishing process.