Бъдеще предварително време като елемент от темпоралната система на френския и българския език

The paper discusses the semantic structure of the futur antérieur tense in French as a unity of temporal, modal and stylistic values. The tense is contrasted with the morphological category of its Bulgarian counterpart, represented by the paradigm of its functional translation equivalents. Compared to the Bulgarian future perfect tense the French futur antérieur is characterized by higher frequency of occurrence and by a significantly greater functional load. One of the objectives of the paper is to find out some of the regularities which could be explained as a result of the characteristic features manifested by the verbal systems of the languages in contrast. The analysis of the future perfect tense in relation to the rest of the tenses has motivated the formulation of certain theoretical and practical conclusions which might have both specific and general methodological significance.