The latter have thus twice as many forms as the former, and that's what makes the treatment of aspect so tricky. After a quick survey of the data and their treatment by the scholars of Bulgarian grammar, I propose an analysis, providing underlying structures for the propositions likely to contain the aspectual verbal forms. This confirms the hypothesis that various operators may be responsible for the selection of the aspect and tense forms of a verbal predicate. The meanings brought about by the rules I formulate have morphological consequences in Bulgarian, but are in French and English are reflected in syntax. One more issue arises from the treatment I propose.
Telic verbs have two stems, while atelic verbs have one.
This asymmetry does not compromise my analysis, assuming that one predicate may have more than one stem and that in such a case predicate formation and expression rules select the input stem. Following the current FG-conventions, the lexicon of these languages would contain many different predicate frames for a single lexical element. Apart from the undesirability of this redundancy, this situation would not properly reflect the semantics of these lexical elements, which describe general concepts, and get a more specific interpretation depending on the slot in which they are used. The solution for this problem that I would like to bring up for discussion is one in which the predicate frame is replaced by a more abstract predicate schema. Lexical elements are no longer represented as part of a frame, but carry an indication of the predicate schemata in which they may occur.