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.
Funding source: Scientific Research Foundation of Flanders FWO
Award Identifier / Grant number: 1122620N
Acknowledgements
I sincerely wish to express my gratitude to the habitual research network in Amsterdam, led by Kees Hengeveld and Hella Olbertz, for inviting me to present and discuss my work on habituals in Ancient Greek. I also would like to thank the two reviewers for their constructive comments and the editors for encouraging me to transliterate the Greek to accommodate a broader audience. All their suggestions, I believe, have improved this paper. All errors that remain are, of course, my own.
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Research funding: This research was supported by funding from a fundamental research grant from the Scientific Research Foundation of Flanders FWO 1122620N on the history of counterfactuals from Archaic to Post-Classical Greek (Vlaamse Overheid).
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