Unbounded repetition, habituality, and aspect from a comparative perspective

Abstract This paper addresses the relationship between habituals, including expressions of unbounded repetition, and verbal aspect. It is often assumed that past events that are conceptualized as habitually occurring or repeated in an unbounded way are inherently expressed by imperfective verb forms in languages with verbal aspect. A crosslinguistic analysis is provided of the relationship between habituals and the perfective and imperfective aspect, based on analysis of 36 languages from different language families. It is shown that there is a strong but certainly not absolute association between the imperfective and habitual constructions/expressions of unbounded repetition with past reference. With respect to perfective habituals, some crosslinguistic patterns can be found. It is further argued that any account of the specific aspectual behavior in habituals must take heed of language-specific properties of the aspectual-verbal structure, and that using general, abstract comparative concepts, such as ‘perfective’, ‘imperfective’, or ‘habitual’, is insufficient to explain aspectual usage.