linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, the aspect of a

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

is a

grammatical category In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive ...

that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect (

abbreviated An abbreviation () is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method including shortening, contraction, initialism (which includes acronym), or crasis. An abbreviation may be a shortened form of a word, usually ended with a trailing per ...

), not to be confused with

iterative aspect In linguistics, the iterative aspect ( abbreviated ), also called " semelfactive", "event-internal pluractionality", or "multiplicative", is a grammatical aspect In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal a ...

frequentative aspect In grammar, a frequentative form (abbreviated or ) of a word indicates repeated action but is not to be confused with iterative aspect. The frequentative form can be considered a separate but not completely independent word called a frequentativ ...

, specifies an action as occurring

habit A habit (or wont, as a humorous and formal term) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. A 1903 paper in the '' American Journal of Psychology'' defined a "habit, from the standpoint of psychology, ...

ually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily. As such, the habitual aspect provides structural information on the nature of the subject

referent A referent ( ) is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken o ...

, "John smokes" being interpretable as "John is a smoker", "Enjoh habitually gets up early in the morning" as "Enjoh is an early bird". The habitual aspect is a type of

imperfective aspect The imperfective (abbreviated , , or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a ...

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

Östen Dahl Östen Dahl (; born 4 November 1945 in Stockholm) is a Swedish linguist and professor best known for pioneering a marker-based approach to tense and aspect in linguistic typology. Dahl finished his PhD at the University of Gothenburg and subsequ ...

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 The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic langua ...

such as Azerbaijani and

Turkish Turkish may refer to: * Something related to Turkey ** Turkish language *** Turkish alphabet ** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation *** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey *** Turkish communities in the former Ottoman Empire * The w ...

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

Hindustani

Modern Hindustani (

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

and

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

) has a specific

participle In linguistics, a participle (; abbr. ) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adject ...

form to mark the habitual aspect. Habitual aspect in Hindi grammar is marked by the habitual participle. The habitual participle is constructed from the infinitive form of the verb by removing the infinitive marker from the verb root and adding . The participles agree with the

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

and the

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

of the

subject Subject ( "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness, or ...

of the sentence which is marked by the vowel the participles end in. Periphrastic Hindustani verb forms consist of two elements. The first element is the aspect marker. The second element is the tense-mood marker. There are four different copulas with which the habitual participle can be used: (to be, to happen), (to stay, to remain), (to go), and (to come). These verbs, even when they are used as copula, themselves can be turned into aspectual participles and can be used with the default auxiliary verb (to be), hence forming sub-aspects that combine the nuance of two aspects. The auxiliary (to stay) gives a nuance of continuity of the perfective state, (to go) is used to construct the passive voice when used with the perfective participle, shows that the action is completed when it is used with intransitive verbs and shows continuity when it is used with habitual participle. Hindustani has three grammatical aspectsː habitual,

perfective The perfective aspect (abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole, i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imp ...

and progressive. Conjugating the auxiliary verbs, which are above in the infinitive form, into their aspectual forms using the auxiliary (to be) gives subaspectual forms for the habitual aspect in their infintive formː

English

Standard 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 nfinitive' 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 In linguistics, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are static, or unchangin ...

, the aspect can be interpreted as

continuous Continuity or continuous may refer to: Mathematics * Continuity (mathematics), the opposing concept to discreteness; common examples include ** Continuous probability distribution or random variable in probability and statistics ** Continuous ...

(that is, it indicates an ongoing, unchanging state, as in ''I used to know that''), although Bernard Comrie classifies this, too, as habitual. ''Used to'' can be used with or without an indicator of temporal location in the past (''We used to do that'', ''We used to do that in 1974''); but the time indicator cannot be too specific; for example, *''We used to do that at 3 pm yesterday'' 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'' does not express habituality, while ''We used to go there'' does 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 The conditional mood (abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood used in conditional sentences to express a proposition whose validity is dependent on some condition, possibly counterfactual. It may refer to a distinct verb form that expresses the condit ...

. English can also indicate habituality in a time-unspecific 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 A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''ability'', ''permission'', ''request'', ''capacity'', ''suggestion'', ''order'', ''obligation'', ''necessity'', ''possibility'' or ''advice''. Modal v ...

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 aspect The continuous and progressive aspects (abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects. In the grammars of many l ...

s can be combined in English, as in ''He used to be playing.''. ''Every time I visit, he's always making something.'' Present tense

African American Vernacular English African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, voca ...

and

Caribbean English Caribbean English (CE, CarE) is a set of dialects of the English language which are spoken in the Caribbean and most countries on the Caribbean coasts of Central America and South America. Caribbean English is influenced by, but is distinct to ...

use an invariant ''be'' to mark habitual or extended actions in the present tense. Some

Hiberno-English Hiberno-English or Irish English (IrE), also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of dialects of English native to the island of Ireland. In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, English is the first language in e ...

in Ireland uses the construction ''do be'' to mark the habitual present.

Romance languages

Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

French French may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France ** French people, a nation and ethnic group ** French cuisine, cooking traditions and practices Arts and media * The French (band), ...

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

, and Portuguese do not have a grammatical form that is specific to the habitual aspect. In the past tense, they have a form called the

imperfect The imperfect ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was doing (something)" o ...

, which combines the

past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some hav ...

with the imperfective aspect and indicates that a past ongoing process was habitual or continuous.

Turkish

, the

aorist Aorist ( ; abbreviated ) verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by the ...

(

: , "broad time") is a habitual aspect, and is similar to the English

present simple The simple present, present simple or present indefinite is one of the verb forms associated with the present tense in modern English. It is commonly referred to as a tense, although it also encodes certain information about aspect in addit ...

. For example, the statement ("I do not eat meat") informs the listener that the speaker is

vegetarian Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the Eating, consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, insects as food, insects, and the flesh of any other animal). It may also include abstaining from eating all by-products of animal slau ...

, not merely that he happens not to be eating meat at that very moment. To imply the latter, the

present progressive The present continuous, also called the present progressive or present imperfect, is a verb form used in modern English that combines the present tense with the continuous aspect. It is formed by the present tense form of be and the present par ...

("I am not eating meat") is used instead.

Cantonese

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

, a

Sinitic language The Sinitic languages (), often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split bet ...

, has a dedicated

particle In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

to express the habitual aspect, , which follows the verb. This is unlike Mandarin and some other Sinitic languages, which have no grammatical indicators of the habitual aspect, but may express habituality via circumlocution.

References

{{Authority control Semantics Grammatical aspects