On the Gigantic Fallacy that there is no Slavic-like Aspect in the Romance Languages and Aspect Resides Only in the Past Domain

This paper deals with a very old drastic misconception, reiterated innumerable times through the decades, including recently, that the Romance languages feature no Slavic-like aspect (which is grammatically realized in verbs as lexical entries) and that aspect in these languages can only consist in grammatical contrasts – morphological or periphrastic, such as aorist-imperfect and progressive- nonprogressive. Data from five languages are used in the analysis: English, also as a metalanguage, French and German, discussed in publications under critique, Bulgarian, Russian. In French and the other Romance languages, aspect, understood precisely as the Slavic perfective-imperfective distinction, is realized in compositional terms – which are also grammatical in the long run, and only partly through the French passé composé-imparfait contrast and the analogous ones in the other Romance languages. Specially emphasized is the massive misinterpretation by aspectologists, and often lack of knowledge, of compositional aspect, a phenomenon discovered more than five decades ago by Henk Verkuyl. Keywords: compositional and verbal aspect, compositional-aspect languages, verbal-aspect languages, perfective-imperfective contrast, aorist-imperfect contrast, article-aspect interplay