Обобщително-актуализиращата същност на перфекта във френския и българския език

The paper discusses some characteristic features of the Perfect tense in French and Bulgarian in comparison to the past tenses and to the whole temporal system. In contrast to the Imperfect and Aorist, the Perfect manifests strong generalizing qualities and expresses direct contact with the present. The semantic similarities between the Perfect and the Present tenses are discussed. The similarity is enhanced in Bulgarian by the qualifying character of the auxiliary verb съм ‘to be’. It seems to be a linguistic fact with considerable consequences in the language that the passé composé has adopted most of the characteristic features of the Aorist and has become the basic narrative tense. There are considerable differences in this respect across the two languages. The author maintains that the Perfect tense in Bulgarian exhibits some typical combinatorial preferences for certain adverbial modifiers, which can be a reliable criterion for defining the value of the Perfect tense in French. It might also facilitate the choice of the most adequate functional equivalent in the process of translation.