The Semantics and Discourse Function of Habitual-Iterative Verbs in Contemporary Czech

Studies of grammaticalized iterative forms in the Slavic languages are scarce, and those that do exist are mostly focused on questions of derivation or historical development and rarely explore the meaning and function of the verb forms in any depth. The present study examines Czech, the Slavic language in which habitual-iterative verbs are most frequently used and most integrated into the overall system of tense, aspect, and modality. Grounded in a corpus of examples taken from contemporary literary Czech and making use of recent work in both semiotic (Peircean) and cognitive approaches to language, it demonstrates why feature-based accounts of the meaning of the iterative form prove inadequate and how a broader perspective on the question, which takes a semiotic and cognitive definition of habit as its starting point, contributes to a clearer understanding of iteration as it is encoded in language.

The study "re-cognizes" the semantics of the habitual-iterative gram in Czech by showing how the various meanings and functions of the verb are coherently related to each other given what is involved in the conceptualization of a habit. In this regard, the linguistic expression of habituality is productively viewed as a token of a larger type of cognitive evaluation that can be termed habitual.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Epigraphs
Introduction

Chapter 1
An Overview of the Corpus

Chapter 2
The Scholarly Context:
Kopecn, Airokova, Kucera, and Filip

Chapter 3
A Semiotic and Cognitive Approach to the Linguistic Expression of
Habituality

Chapter 4
Habitual Verbs and Conceptual Distancing

Chapter 5
The Discourse Function of Habitual Verbs

Chapter 6
A Typology of Iteration

Bibliography