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The main aim of this introduction article is to give a general overview of how habituality has been investigated in the literature as a grammatical category. In doing so, we first elaborate on the question of how habituality can be characterized and what difficulties one encounters in determining its properties, which include non-contingent modal event recurrence. A brief discussion of these issues is given in Section 2. Section 3 outlines selected (conceptual and formal) connections between habituality and other grammatical categories. What our observations essentially indicate is that habituality, on the one hand, closely interacts with several TAM categories, most prominently imperfective aspect and its derivatives (progressive, continuative), and also interacts in special ways with modal categories, such as the evidential or the future, on the other hand, we also observeas has been done previouslythat habituality is often not encoded overtly and can be expressed by several forms within one and the same language, and if overtly marked by a dedicated form, diachronically, it is not always stable. Finally, Section 4 summarizes the most relevant findings of the articles collected in the present special issue and highlights their importance for the general discussion about habituality.

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The main aim of this chapter is to examine adverbial causal af-því-að-clauses in modern Icelandic. Semantically, we argue that af-því-að-clauses can be interpreted as eventuality-related, as evidential or as speech-act-related causal clauses. Syntactically, we show that af-því-að-clauses can be analyzed as central, peripheral or disintegrated adverbial clauses in the sense claimed by Haegeman (2010, 2012), Schönenberger and Haegeman (this volume), and Frey (2011, 2012, 2016). Based on Krifka (to appear) and Frey (2020, to appear, this volume), we assume af-því-að-clauses to be assertive clauses attaching – depending on their interpretation – as Tense Phrase, Judge Phrase or Act Phrase adjuncts. Essentially, we take interpretative differences to follow from the distinct attachment heights. Main arguments for this three part division are based on binding data, embeddability, movement restrictions, and clausal anaphora.