De la temporalité linguistique

Problems concerning aspect and tense in Russian and French are discussed. Special attention is paid to actual (aspectual) present tense. With respect to the syntactic pattern it is assumed that the marked aspectual character of the Russian verb and the small number of tense forms has something to do with the comparative uniformity of morpho-syntactic means; in French, conversely, the various tenses determine its great morpho-syntactic complexity.