A Layered Approach to Habitual Constructions

Habitual constructions, such as English used to and Spanish soler, are linguistic expressions denoting situations that typically occur. This volume proposes a novel approach to such expressions, arguing that habituality is not a unified semantic category, but rather a family of related meanings which differ in their scopal position within the clause. The volume contains a detailed account of habitual meaning from the perspective of Functional Discourse Grammar as well as in-depth empirical studies of habitual constructions in ten languages: Coptic, Plains Cree, Dolgan, Ancient Greek, Kwaza, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, and Spanish. It will be of interest not just to specialists of these languages, but to anyone working on habituality and other aspectual categories in the languages of the world.