Reflections on habituality across other grammatical categories

Abstract

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.

On the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya

“…(Bohnemeyer, 2002, p. 41-42;Smith, 1997). This has been noted in a number of works on the Yucatec TAM-system (Bohnemeyer, 2002;Vinogradov, 2013;Lehmann, 2017), and it is not an aspectual property specific to Yucatec. Rather, it follows the "most typical subdivisions of imperfectivity" according to Comrie (1976, p. 25) in which the habitual and the progressive are both part of the category of 'imperfective aspect' (see Figure 4).…”

Down the paths to the past habitual: its historical connections with counterfactual pasts, future in the pasts, iteratives and lexical sources in Ancient Greek

“…As mentioned above, cross-linguistic research on expressions of habituality has suggested that diachronic paths for this domain lead especially to past habituality. Typological research has also more specifically dealt with, on the hand, the form-functional connection of (past) habituality with irrealis marking across languages (Cristofaro 2004;Palmer 2001: 190-191) and, on the other hand, with conceptual similarities between habituality and larger domains such as imperfectivity (Bertinetto and Lenci 2010;Boneh and Jędrzejowski 2019). While such typological research has confirmed that the past habitual is cross-linguistically used to express various functions falling under the problematic descriptive header of irrealis, it has also shown that the forms expressing habituality and some irrealis functions display "considerable structural and functional diversity cross-linguistically" (Cristofaro 2004: 261).…”

Mass, Iteration, and Pejoration: On the Evolution of Iterative Adverbs from Indefinite Quantifiers in German Varieties

“…For the purposes of this study, I am particularly interested in iterative adverbs that express habituality . Based on Xrakovskij 1997b:27–28 and Boneh & Jędrzejowski 2019:4, habitual situations or actions are those that occur—or repeat—at regular intervals, whenever circumstances permit. Under this definition, all habitual actions are also iterative, but not all iterative actions are habitual.…”

“…Comrie (1976:26–27), for example, classifies habituality as a subcategory of imperfectivity, while he assigns certain forms of iterativity (namely, temporally limited repetitions) to perfectivity. Other approaches consider habituality as a separate category next to imperfectivity (see, for example, Boneh & Jędrzejowski 2019:4–7 for a detailed discussion). Crucially, however, what all of these approaches have in common is that they all treat habituality as a category of aspectuality.…”