linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, the

aspect Aspect or Aspects may refer to: Entertainment * ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art * Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company * Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England * ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...

of a

verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...

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 exclusiv ...

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 (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...

), 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 that expresses the repetition of an event observable on one single occasion, as in 'he ...

or frequentative aspect, 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.

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, "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 ge ...

, 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 over 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 Western Asia. The Turkic languag ...

such as Azerbaijani and Turkish, he found that the habitual can occur in combination with the predictive mood.

Hindustani

Modern Hindustani (

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...

and

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
''

participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") 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 ...

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 -''nā'' from the verb root and adding -''tā''. The participles agree with the

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...

and the

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original 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 c ...

of the subject 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: ''honā'' (to be, to happen), ''rêhnā'' (to stay, to remain), ''jānā'' (to go), and ''ānā'' (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 ''honā'' (to be), hence forming sub-aspects that combine the nuance of two aspects. The auxiliary ''rêhnā'' (to stay) gives a nuance of continuity of the perfective state, ''jānā'' (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 i ...

and progressive. Conjugating the auxiliary verbs, which are above in the infinitive form, into their aspectual forms using the auxiliary ''honā'' (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, 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'', or ''advice''. Modal verbs generally accompany the b ...

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 ...

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, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urba ...

and

Caribbean English Caribbean English (CE, CarE) is a set of dialects of the English language which are spoken in the Caribbean and Liberia, most countries on the Caribbean coast of Central America, and Guyana and Suriname on the coast of South America. Carib ...

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

Hiberno-English Hiberno-English (from Latin ''Hibernia'': "Ireland"), and in ga, Béarla na hÉireann. or Irish English, also formerly Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland a ...

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

Romance languages

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...

like French,

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 Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

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

, and

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

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 walking" or "used to ...

, 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.

Cantonese

Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...

, a

Sinitic language The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is ...

, has a dedicated

particle In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule 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 ...

to express the habitual aspect, 開 ''hoi1'', 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