Volume 72, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Habituality from a typological and diachronic perspective, Issue Editors: Nora Boneh and Łukasz Jędrzejowski

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 observe – as has been done previously – that 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.

Our knowledge about tense, aspect and modality (TMA) in the Oceanic languages of Melanesia has so far been severely limited by the lack of available data. Habituality in particular, as one of the less described TMA categories, has not yet been widely discussed for this group of languages. Based on corpus data and elicitations, we give a detailed overview of four languages, identifying common trends and addressing specific questions of general concern. These include the relation of habituality to (im)perfectivity and the relation between habituality and irrealis.

In Cuzco Quechua (CQ), a periphrastic construction optionally marked for the past tense is said to serve as past habitual. The study focuses on the evolution of this construction in CQ. Its development replicates the cline suggested by Bybee et al. in 1994 and supports their findings but not in full: Although the habitual marker in CQ is restricted temporally to the past, it bears no past tense marking. The article sketches the different stages and concludes that the construction in question had further grammaticalized to a past imperfective.

This article is concerned with some features of the tempo-aspectual system of Shumcho, a small West Himalayish (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken in a few villages in the district Kinnaur (State of Himachal Pradesh) in the Indian Himalayas, and provides a descriptive account of the language’s strategies to express progressive or habitual action and the effects of the respective markers with various types of predicates. I also consider the semantic (evidential) properties of the copulas and their interaction with the aspect/tense system, and offer some thoughts on the historical development of imperfective and perfective constructions as met in the present-day language.

The paper focuses on a two aspectual morphemes in Moksha Mordvin (<Mordvin<Finno-Ugric). The first of them, the Frequentative, has four phonologically conditioned allomorphs, - ənd-, -n’ə-, -s’ə -, and - kšn’ə -. These affixes used to be separate morphemes in Proto-Finno-Ugric, but ended up as having the same meaning and being complementarily distributed. A remnant of a more archaic stage of language evolution is the Avertive marker, - əkšn’ə -, only different from one of the Frequentative allomorphs by one phoneme, which can hardly be a coincidence. A diachronic hypothesis about how iterative-avertive polyfunctionality could have arisen is suggested.

In this article, I discuss the strategies employed in Polish for expressing habituality in various contexts. It is also for Polish that I define habituality as a summarized presentation of similar events in the ‘actual world’ (or the ‘narrated world’) which occur over a relatively long stretch of time, on several separate occasions, with the number of occurrences not specified explicitly and with a clear interval between the occasions. Thus defined, habituality may be denoted in Polish by imperfective verb forms, specialized derived imperfective verb forms, periphrasis with the verb zwyknąć ‘to be in a habit of’, and reflexive habitual forms.