Affiliation:
1. Department of Linguistics , Ghent University , Ghent , Belgium
Abstract
Abstract
To complement existing synchronic typological studies of the marking strategies of (past) habituality, this paper details the diachronic paths leading to and from past habitual constructions. The rich corpus evidence from the diachrony of Ancient Greek demonstrates at least four source constructions: (1) past counterfactual mood (in optative and indicative), (2) futures in the past, (3) iteratives (with -sk) and (4) lexical sources with semantic affinity to habituality (volition, habit, love). It is argued that the former two acquire habitual meaning through an invited inference of epistemic certainty of the statement by the speaker: what certainly would have happened in the knowable past is implied to be characteristic of the past. The past forms with the so-called iterative -sk (3) suffix follow the cross-linguistically frequent evolution of pluractional constructions through a form of semantic bleaching: past iterative > frequentative > habitual > habitual imperfective. Lexical sources (4) first acquire habitual meaning in the present after which only the more heavily grammaticalized ones receive past habitual usage through semantic bleaching and generalization of usage (as reflected by host class expansions). The paper is concluded with a diachronic map of these paths into habituality and the paths leading from past habituality into other domains such as genericity.
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Reference80 articles.
1. Allan, Rutger J. 2017a. The history of the future: Grammaticalization and subjectification in Ancient Greek future expressions. In Frédérique Lambert, Rutger J. Allan & Theodore Markopoulos (eds.), The Greek future and its history. Le futur grec et son histoire, 43–72. Leuven: Peeters.
2. Allan, Rutger J. 2017b. The imperfect inbound. A cognitive linguistic approach to Greek aspect. In Klaas Bentein, Mark Janse & Jorie Soltic (eds.), Variation and change in Ancient Greek tense, aspect and modality, 100–130. Leiden & Boston: Brill.
3. Allan, Rutger J. 2019. Aspect and construal. A cognitive linguistic approach to iterativity, habituality and genericity in Greek. In Egle Mocciaro & William M. Short (eds.), Toward a cognitive classical linguistics, 16–41. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
4. Basset, Louis. 1979. Les emplois périphrastiques du verbe grec μέλλειν : Etude de linguistique grecque et essai de linguistique générale. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient.
5. Beck, Jana E., Sophia A. Malamud & Iryna Osadcha. 2012. A semantics for the particle ἄν in and outside conditionals in Classical Greek. Journal of Greek Linguistics 12(1). 51–83.