French Grammar in Context

Aspect as a communicative category. Evidence from English, Russian and French

“…French aspect in informal/oral discourse is undoubtedly a two-way distinction as it is in Russian (cf. Mosegaard Hansen 2016 andJupp &Rouxeville 2014), but in formal/written discourse it must be a three-way distinction between one imperfective form, imparfait, which presents an action as an ongoing process, planned action, an visually experienced event, as a failed event, as an event in an imagined world and as a characterization of a person, and two perfective forms, passé simple and passé composé, which both refer to an event, but differ in the way they present it to the reader: they name the same, but frame it differently. Note that Old Russian had the same system consisting of the aorist, the perfect and the imperfectthis tripartite system was replaced with a new dichotomic system consisting of the perfective and the imperfective aspect within complex verbs (cf.…”

“…New grammars of French (cf. Mosegaard Hansen 2016 andJubb &Rouxeville 2014) or completely new accounts of aspect (cf. Salaberry 2017) look at modern French from the point of view of oral discourse and thus ignore the passé simple form viewing passé composé and imparfait as the real aspectual distinction in French.…”