Imperfectives and Plurality

Abstract

What about habituals? I should say from the beginning that I will only be dealing here with what I will call 'simple habituals'. Habituality has often been discussed in connection with issues related to the expression of genericity in natural languages, the former being considered as a special case of the letter (see Krifka et al.

Modal aspects of Badiaranke aspect

“…On the theoretical front, I have demonstrated the need for a revision of conventional theories of aspect with regard to Badiaranke, and the inextricability of modality from the semantics of aspect (as previously argued, for instance, by Dowty (1977, 1979), Landman (1992, and Portner (1998) regarding the English progressive, by Ferreira (2004) for habituals, and by Portner (2003) for the English perfect). By using the same morphology to mark not only progressive and habitual, but also a number of other semantic categories usually considered more modal than aspectual, Badiaranke provides evidence for the inherent modality not only of the progressive, but of imperfective aspect in general.…”

“…Chung and Timberlake, 1985;Ferreira, 2004;Boneh and Doron, 2008), argue that habituals require the eventuality described to have the potential to recur in the (relative) future. Thus someone who has quit smoking once and for all can no longer truthfully say ''I smoke,'' even if s/he has smoked every day for decades.…”

“…Its modal nature is satisfying given recent modal analyses of the English progressive (e.g. Portner, 1998) and habitual (Ferreira, 2004), as well as of imperfectives in other languages, e.g. Blackfoot (Dunham, 2007).…”

“…(57) is true at < w, TU > iff all of those best worlds contain an eventuality e, of which the e 0 whose circumstances are laid out in (58) is a stage, in which Sana sews a complete outfit. Ferreira (2004Ferreira ( , 2005 demonstrates that Portner's (1998) modal analysis of the progressive can be straightforwardly extended to habitual imperfectives cross-linguistically; the only difference is that progressives apply to ''singular intervals,'' consisting of one continuous stretch, whereas habituals apply to ''plural intervals,'' consisting of two or more non-contiguous intervals. In the habitual case, Ferreira argues, ''non-interruption'' means that in all the inertia worlds, there is at least one future singular interval after TU, such that TU is included in a plural interval in which there is an eventuality of which the eventuality description holds (Ferreira, 2004:87).…”

Habituals with indefinite singular objects: aspect and modality1

“…In Ferreira (2004Ferreira ( , 2005, a distinction is made between bare habituals and quantiicational habituals. Note that the former term applies to sentences with no adverbials while the latter applies to sentences with adverbials of quantiication.…”