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The aim of this paper is to examine the mental representation of the perfect aspect and its possible morphological realizations in the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and in the French spoken in France. We considered that the perfect is the aspect that relates a past situation to its present relevance. The past situation can persist in the present (universal perfect) or not (existential perfect). In Portuguese, we verified that the universal perfect can be expressed by the compound past, by the present tense and by the periphrasis "estar" + present participle. The existential perfect can be expressed by the combination of the simple past and other elements in the sentence. In French, the universal perfect can be expressed by the present tense combined with certain adverbial expressions. The existential perfect can be expressed by the combination of the compound past and other elements in the sentence. Despite the differences in the perfect aspect realization, we considered that this aspect can be syntactically represented in both languages by an aspectual functional head different from that one with grammatical aspect information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]