Jean-Pierre Desclés et Zlatka Guentchéva : How to determine the meanings of the French « passé composé » by means of contextual exploration? Having given precise definitions of aspectual primitives (resulting state, inferential state, event...), the authors examine the effects of contextual environments on a semantic interpretation of the French « passé composé » by means of heuristic rules. It is argued that the invariant meaning of French « passé composé » is a complex value: "resulting state - event". To solve this semantic indétermination, a general method, known as Contextual Exploration, is used: different contextual occurrences of linguistic markers such as adverbial expressions, discourse relations, meanings of verbal predicates. . . contribute to determining the interpretation of this tense in context.