10. Habituality and the habitual aspect

Abstract

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.

16 Modal and Temporal Aspects of Habituality

“…What determines tense is the relation between P and S. But since the past form of the periphrastic form is morphologically a tense morpheme, we cannot reapply tense morphology to it, and so the periphrastic form cannot be inflected for tense. We suggest that this explains the fact mentioned in Boneh and Doron (2008) whereby periphrastic habitual forms in Hebrew (and English) are limited to past form, and do not occur in the present and the future forms. The parallelism between the retrospective habitual and the universal present perfect has provided us with an account for the disjointness implicature.…”

“…We have already argued in previous work (Boneh and Doron 2008) for the existence of a habituality modal operator Hab which is independent of imperfective aspect. Here we defend this analysis further, in particular in the face of reductionist views such as Ferreira (2005), who treats Hab as reducible to imperfectivity of plural events, and Hacquard (2006), who treats imperfective aspect as reducible to modal operators such as Hab/Prog.…”

“…Default aspect is perfective in the case of dynamic events, and imperfective in the case of states (cf. Boneh and Doron 2008). Thus, states pattern alike in Hebrew and in English, in that they are imperfective by default, yet they can be interpreted perfectively, on their non-default reading.…”

“…We noted in Boneh and Doron (2008) that periphrastic habituals, on the other hand, are judged to be false if uninstantiated:…”

Cross-linguistic variation in imperfectivity

“…3.1 that generic/habitual readings are typical of Imperfectives in many languages (but see Boneh and Doron 2008). While a full account of generics/habituals in Mẽbengokre must await future research, they do not appear to contradict the approach to IMPF advocated in this paper.…”