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THE STRUCTURE OF HABITUALITY
Khabibullina Liliya Jakhonovna
the teacher of English Department
Bukhara State Medical Institute
liliya86xab@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14685294
In what follows, we briefly summarize the most important findings of the
contributions collected in the present special issue, all, relying on extensive field
work and attested examples and show how they contribute to the current
research on habituality.
Kilu von Prince, Ana Krajinovic, Anna Margetts, Nick Thieberger and Valerie
Guerin’s contribution, Habituality in four Oceanic languages of Melanesia, is
concerned with the question of how habituality can be expressed in Daakaka,
Mavea, Nafsan and Saliba-Logea, spoken in New Guinea as well as in Vanuatu,
and to what extent it interacts with other grammatical categories, mainly with
imperfectivity and (ir) realis. The interaction with imperfectivity indicates that
habituality is often encoded by morphemes expressing imperfective aspect. As
outlined above, typologically it is not surprising. As for the mood distinction, von
Prince et al. show that both realis and (ir)realis expressions can occur in
habitual contexts. Differences between in the individual languages are to be
observed though. For instance, whereas the default mood for habitual contexts
in Daakaka is realis, irrealis proclitics are usually attested in Nafsan.
Importantly, the authors note that in all the surveyed languages, habituality is
commonly unmarked, but alongside null marking the authors identify different
strategies the languages employ, not always uniformly, for encoding habituality:
(i) auxiliaries deriving from a verb meaning stay, (ii) reduplication, and (iii)
patterns/markers characteristic of one of languages under investigation, e.g. . an
imperfective affix in Mavea. The authors draw attention to the fact that despite
the prevailing null marketing and the optionality it bring to understand a given
sentence as either habitual or episodic (ongoing/progressive) or iterative, cases
where a sentence is obligatorily interpreted as habitual often combine two
means of expression of the list above, e.g. an imperfective marker with
reduplication. Finally, it is noted that in these languages there are no temporal
restrictions on the expression of habituality, but indeed synchronically and
diachronically there is a tight affinity between the expression of habituality and
imperfectivity.
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Rammie Cahlon’s article, The evolution of PAST-HAB in Cuzo Quechua,
focuses on the grammaticalization of a past habitual marker of the verb be and a
nominalized form in Cuzco Quechua (Quechuan). In his corpus-based
contribution adopting the habitual grammaticalization path outlined in Bybee et
al. (1994), Cahlon develops an account under investigation. Cahlon illustrates
that the combination of the nominalization and the copula acquired a habitual
meaning with no tense restriction. The author also identifies how the
construction grammaticalized further into a generalized impererfective and has
become restricted to past contexts, as time went by.
Christian Huber’s contribution, Progressivity and habituality in Shumcho,
provides an in-depth survey of imperfective and progressive forms that give rise
to the expression of habituality in the West Haimalayish language Shumcho. In
this survey, Huber pays careful attention to the interaction of these verbal forms
and lexical aspect. He shows that the progressive form, which is periphrastic, is
quite similar to other well documented progressives, in that in ‘coerces’
achievements and is generally not available with statives, unless they can be tied
to a specific situation. The synthetic imperfective form, on the other hand, and
future events. Additionally, the imperfective form can combine with
copulas/auxiliaries, which render it exclusively habitual, where each type of
auxiliary contributes additional meaning layers having to do with undefined
time reference, but also evidentiality and mirativity, positioning the speaker as
direct or indirect witness of the habit. The picture that emerges is a highly
intricate one, showing various morphological means that can be employed to
express habituality, albeit with varying nuances, but all sharing the feature of
being non-perfective. Considering the diachronic development of these forms,
the author suggests that the imperfective form originated as a nominalized or
adjective-like form.
Interestingly, the suggested diachronic path seems to be opposite to the one
in Cuzo Quechua: Whereas in Shumcho, a nominalized form first gives rise to
imperfectiviny, and thenderiving habituality via the addition of an auxiliary, in
Cuzo Quechua, the nominalized form with a copula initially gave rise to
habituality, gradually, though the loss of precise time reference, has become a
generalized past imperfective. In Shumcho, no process of neutralization of tense
reference is attested, and in this respect Shumcho is like the Oceanic languages.
Alexey Kozlov’s contribution, Iterative and avertive polysemy in Moksha
Mordvin, studies a rather unusual affinity between a pluractional derivational
affix, also giving rise to habituality, and avertive one. The author first surveys the
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array of phonologically, examining their distribution, and the way they interact
with the various types of predicates in terms of lexical aspect. Kozlov observes
that while the pluractional affixes may give rise to both internal and external
pluractionality, the affix is obligatory when the sentence is to be interpreted
habituality. Then the author turns to discuss the distributional and
interpretative properties of the avertive affix which attaches to telic/perfective
verbs, irrespective of the phonological properties of the root, and expresses that
the underlying event was on the verge of happening, but eventually did not. In
this respect, the Moksha Mordvin avertive differs from the English be about to
which stays neutral as to the subsequent realization of the event. It appears then
that distributively the pluractional and the avertive can never be truly
ambiguous. Also, due to selectional restrictions, the two morphemes seem not to
be combinable. The highly improbable combination of consonants leads to think
that there is a diachronic affinity between the two. The proposed explanation to
this unusual grammaticalization path relies, presumably, on the prospective as a
common core. Whereas, the connection between the avertive and the
prospective is transparent, it is less so for the pluractional and the author
conjectures that non-commitment to actual occurrence at the reference time is
the heart of the matter, mentioning also evidence from related languages for
conditional uses to similar combinations of consonants.
Finally, Lea Sawicki’s contribution, Expressions of habituality in Polish, deals
with the synchronic heterogeneity of Polish habitual. She follows the received
ideals and the category of habituality as “a summarized presentation of similar
events occurring over relatively prolonged stretch of time, on several separate
occasions not specified by number, with a clear interval between the occasions’’.
Sawicki registers four different patterns encoding habituality in Polish: (i)
imperfective verb, primary or derived from a perfective verb, (ii) imperfective
verb derived from another imperfective verb, (iii) periphrastic construction with
the verb ‘used to’ + infinitive of an imperfective verb, and (iv) impersonal
reflexive composed of the reflexive pronoun and an imperfective verb. The
author exemplifies these expressions and some of their contexts of use, also
commenting on their productivity.
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