A Cognitive Account of Tense and

1. Introductory remarks In contemporary linguistic literature verbal aspect, along with the category of tense, has been one of the most controversial issues. This controversy, I believe, is to a large extent caused by certain misunderstanding and, as a result, misinterpretation of the genuine (that is, not superficially imposed through an application of some arbitrary semantic procedure) grammatical (categorial) meaning of tense and aspect. The controversy is largely rooted in the fact that in many languages of the world the number of grammatical forms of the verb referred to as “tenses”, is more than three, so these forms do not fit very well in the conventional triadic schema known as “time axis” (Figure 1):