This papers focuses on French imperfect inflectional paradigm. It draws the main lines of an analytical framework which stems from two distinct theoretical bases. On the one side, it builds on Distributed Morphology ; on the other, it assumes the principles of Autosegmental phonology and the CV model. Each morpheme is associated to a unique phonological exponent. This exponent applies to each occurrence of a given morpheme within the inflectional paradigm. As a consequence, an inflected form is decomposed into minimal units, each one of which corresponds to a terminal node in the syntactic tree. The surface form of the morphemes results from the interaction between the phonological operations and the syntactic positions. Thus, phonology occupies a central place in word-formation processes.