Can there be a nontemporal definition of the French **imparfait**? A "network" approach

0. Introduction Traditional approaches to the French imparfait define it either as a past tense or as a tense signaling nonactuality. The aim of this paper is to show that this discussion can be solved if it is accepted that the meanings of the imparfait form a " network " (Langacker 1990). In such an approach, the use of the imparfait to express past-time reference constitutes its prototype, and the idea of nonactuality, duly defined, renders the schematic meaning of this tense. In the present paper, I will first present the classical terms of the debate on the basic meaning of the imparfait and introduce a " psychological " definition of the tense, which can be reformulated in terms of mental spaces (Fau-connier 1984), following a hypothesis first proposed for the Spanish imper-fective past tense or pretérito imperfecto by Doiz-Bienzobas (1995, 2002). According to this definition, the imparfait signals that the expressed situation must be represented as ongoing in a mental space different from the one associated with the speaker's here-and-now. But if the meaning of the imparfait is defined in this way, it remains to be explained why most speakers do see it as a past tense. Consequently, I will propose that the meaning of the imparfait is to be presented as a network, where the past meaning represents its proto-typical, central meaning, and the nontemporal meaning defined above is the schematic meaning. I will argue that such a representation can integrate the values that are traditionally attributed to the imparfait: its imperfective aspect and its ana-phoricity. I will moreover show how the different uses of the imparfait can be derived either from the prototypical past meaning or from the schematic meaning. But before doing so, I will first recapitulate the classic debate: is the imparfait fundamentally a past tense or not?