10

The aim of this article is to show that figurative expressions are constrained by various tense and aspect parameters. In particular we show that figurative expressions are often interpreted as stative and the loss of the dynamic feature has some consequences on the aspectual behaviour. Thus “completed” (or “perfective”) and “progressive” aspects are often not compatible with figurative expressions. Until now these types of interactions have largely remained unnoticed.The article is illustrated by case examples from French, however it is clear that these interactions and constraints have a universal dimension. The tense and aspect framework used in this description is the “configuration and perspective” model which is a typologically driven approach. One of its advantages is that it does not presume aspectual equivalences between languages. A lexical aspect (or Aktionsart) in a given language may correspond to a grammatical aspect in another language.