The paper examines the linguistic expression of habituality showing that two concepts must be distinguished: gnomic habituality and actualized habituality. It is claimed, on the basis of Modern Hebrew, that the two concepts are derived from non-quantificational habitual operators -Hab which is modal and yields gnomic habituality, and Φ Hab which is aspectual and yields actualized habituality. The core meaning of both operators is iteration over a contextually long interval. Syntactically, the operators differ with respect to their position: Hab is argued to be a VP-level adverb and Φ Hab -an aspectual head. This is correlated with the fact that gnomic habituality is expressed via the simple form of the verb while the expression of actualized habituality involves periphrasis. The paper ends with a diachronic consideration of the Hebrew periphrastic form suggesting that its habitual use can already be detected in Biblical Hebrew.
The paper argues that Possession is to be decomposed into three distinct syntactic configurations, each associated with its own meaning. These include Temporary Location, represented as an ordinary small clause, the Part-Whole relation, which always has a complement structure within DP as its source, and an applicative structure ApplP, the source of inalienable possession, where humans are treated as special. The analysis we propose extends to English, but focuses on Palestinian Arabic, a language which overtly distinguishes a number of ingredients which in other languages enter into Possession less transparently: it is 'analytic' with respect to HAVE, it marks Temporary Location and Part-Whole relations by distinct prepositions, and it features a scope-marking poor agreement / rich agreement distinction. The picture which emerges is partly familiar and partly new. We argue that the subject in possessive clauses is a derived subject in the alienable, inalienable, and Part-Whole relations, but not necessarily in the non-human locative relation, where raising to specIP is governed by considerations of economy and variation in the morpho-syntax of agreement. We also argue that clausal possession has a DP as its source, but only on the Part-Whole construal, drawing on previous work on the DP-internal semantics of possession. Finally, the applicative structure, on our conception, may be basic, or derived by head-movement, as it is in English, and it may be headed by an overt preposition, or simply contain an abstract head, as it does in PA. If we are correct, the difference between HAVE and BE may further reduce to parametric realization of prepositions in ApplP. The analysis we develop leads to a new division of labor between phi-features and the triggers for A-movement, according to which phi-features exert their effect on syntax only from the interfaces. Whereas rich agreement fixes scope, visible at LF, the EPP, as such, is regulated only at PF. Deconstructing PossessionBoneh & Sichel 2 Deconstructing PossessionNora Boneh and Ivy Sichel IntroductionThe term 'possession' typically conflates a variety of notions. The relations which may be expressed by English HAVE, for example, stretch beyond inalienable and alienable possession, in (1a-c), to include also Temporary Location of various sorts, in (1d-f):(1) a.The tree has many branches b.John has three kids c. John has three blankets d. Mary has the car e. John has three blankets on him f. The tree has three nests *(in it)The grammatical realization of these relations is governed by several conditions having to do with whether the possessee is definite, whether the possessor DP denotes a human, and whether the head noun denotes a function. Our goal here is to identify the underlying syntactic structures and the procedures which derive the semantic relations with which they are associated.Following up on the syntactic decomposition in Hornstein et al. (1995), and bringing it to bear relation, which we take to be broader than inalienable possession, and a Tem...
We argue that habituality is primarily a modal category, which can only indirectly be characterized in aspectual terms, depending on the particular aspectual operators at work in a given language. In languages which do not overtly contrast perfective/imperfective aspect, we identify a habitual form, morphologically and aspectually complex, which characterizes an interval in retrospect by means of an actualized habit holding throughout the interval.
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