Habitual aspect
Encyclopedia
In linguistics, the aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...

 of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily. The habitual aspect is a type of imperfective aspect
Imperfective aspect
The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with internal structure, such as ongoing, habitual, repeated, and similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future...

; the latter does not depict an event as a single entity viewed only as a whole, but instead specifies something about its internal temporal structure.

Dahl found that the habitual past, the most common tense context for the habitual, occurred in only seven of 60 languages sampled, including English. Especially in Turkic languages
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...

 such as Azerbaijani
Azerbaijani language
Azerbaijani or Azeri or Torki is a language belonging to the Turkic language family, spoken in southwestern Asia by the Azerbaijani people, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran...

 and Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

, he found that the habitual can occur in combination with the predictive mood.

Habituality in English

English has two habitual aspectual forms in the past tense. One is illustrated by the sentence "I used to go there frequently". The "used to [infinitive]" construction always refers to the habitual aspect when the infinitive is a non-stative verb; in contrast, when "used to" is used with a stative verb
Stative verb
A stative verb is one that asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property . Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; that is, they have undefined duration...

, the aspect can be interpreted as stative (that is, it indicates an ongoing, unchanging state, as in "I used to know that"), although Comrie classifies this too as habitual. "Used to ..." can be used without an indicator of temporal location in the past, or with a non-specific temporal indicator ("We used to do that", "We used to do that in 1974"); but Comrie states that the time indicator cannot be too specific, so that "We used to do that every Monday in 1974" is not grammatical.

The second way that habituality is expressed in the past is by using the auxiliary verb "would", as in "Last summer we would go there every day." This usage requires a lexical indication of when the action occurred; by itself the sentence "We would go there every day" is meaningless, while "We used to go there every day" is meaningful even though it does not specify when. As with "used to", "would" also has other uses in English that do not indicate habituality: in "In January 1986 I knew I would graduate in four months", it indicates the future viewed from a past perspective; in "I would go if I felt better", it indicates the conditional mood
Conditional mood
In linguistics, the conditional mood is the inflectional form of the verb used in the independent clause of a conditional sentence to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event, that is contingent on another set of circumstances...

.

English can also indicate habituality in a time-inspecific way, referring generically to the past, present, and future, by using the auxiliary "will" as in "He will make that mistake all the time, won't he?". As with "used to" and "would", the auxiliary "will" has other uses as well: as an indicator of future time ("The sun will rise tomorrow at 6:14"), and as a modal verb
Modal verb
A modal verb is a type of auxiliary verb that is used to indicate modality -- that is, likelihood, ability, permission, and obligation...

 indicating volition ("At this moment I will not tolerate dissent").

Habitual aspect is frequently expressed in unmarked form in English, as in "I walked to work every day for ten years", "I walk to work every day", and "I will walk to work every day after I get well".

The habitual and progressive aspects can be combined in English, as in "He used to be playing."

Romance languages

The Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

 such as French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese do not have a grammatical form that is specific to the habitual aspect. In the past tense they do have a form called the imperfect that combines the past tense
Past tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...

with the imperfective aspect; this form is used to indicate that a past ongoing process was either habitual or continuous.
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