After Verkuyl’s Discovery Aspect is No Longer a Mystery, but Aspectology Needs a Reform Review Article: Henk Verkuyl, The Compositional Nature of Tense, Mood and Aspect (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 167). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022

This is a review article on a new monograph by Henk Verkuyl, the finder of compositional aspect (CA), which crowns his research for six decades already. The paper summarizes Verkuyl’s contribution in describing the mechanism of aspect in CA languages by establishing two semantico-syntactic schemata, a perfective and an imperfective one. Defects, flaws and omissions in his model are also identified. Verkuyl’s discovery is widely recognized but his theory is misconceptualized in its very core by a large part of the aspectological community. The reasons for the massive misconceptualization are analyzed against the author’s own model, claimed to be capable of providing the most adequate explanation of CA vis-à-vis verbal aspect (VA) and of doing ultimate justice to Verkuyl’s “oeuvre”. Keywords: compositional aspect, verbal aspect, article-aspect interplay, boundedness/non-boundedness, perfectivity/imperfectivity, temporality of situation participants