Aspectual Expressions in Korean and French: A Comparative Analysis Based on Desclés’ Theory.

This study offers a comparative analysis of the aspectual expression systems in Korean and French, grounded in Jean-Pierre Descles’ aspect-tense theory. Although both languages share universal aspectual categories such as state, process, and event, they diverge significantly in how these categories are realized due to typological and grammatical factors. Korean allows a morphological separation between tense and aspect, using auxiliary verbs and suffixes to flexibly encode event boundaries, completion, resultative states, and iterativity from the speaker’s perspective. In contrast, French integrates aspectual meaning within tense morphology, resulting in a more fixed aspectual system with grammatically required forms. Korean permits discourse-driven variation in aspectual marking, whereas French imposes stricter syntactic constraints. By analyzing event types and temporal schematization through Descles’ framework, this study demonstrates that aspectual expression reflects cognitive and pragmatic choices rather than mere tense combinations. The findings deepen our understanding of cross-linguistic temporal cognition and structural universality.