Abstract

BARRETO, Eccia Alécia  and  FREITAG, Raquel Meister Ko.. Coding the habitual aspect. Diacrítica [online]. 2014, vol.28, n.1, pp.253-282. ISSN 0807-8967.

Habitual aspect presupposes a more or less regular situation iteration such as that habit effect is a property of a given entity. In Brazilian Portuguese, habitual aspect can be expressed by pretérito imperfeito (PI) and pretérito perfeito (PP) tenses, however, each form is associated with specific contexts of use. In this study, we aim to identify features and contexts that characterize the occurrence of habitual aspect related to IP and PP tenses. We propose a usage-based approach (Bybee, 2010), associated to the notion of aspectual gradiency. We identified 321 contexts of habituation. The quantitative data suggest that the trajectories of change require a reduced stability of the system, when the overlapping of PP and PI tenses occurs to express the same function: the expression of habitual aspect.

Keywords : Verbal aspect; Compositionality; Habitual aspect.

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