In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state.[1][2] As its name suggests, the habitual aspect (abbreviated HAB), not to be confused with iterative aspect or frequentative aspect, specifies an action as occurring habitually: 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, 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 found that the habitual past, the most common tense context for the habitual, occurred in only seven of 60 languages sampled, including English.[2]: 101 Especially in Turkic languages such as Azerbaijani and Turkish, he found[2]: 111 that the habitual can occur in combination with the predictive mood.
- ^ Comrie, Bernard (1976). Aspect. Cambridge University Press. pp. 25, 30, 98–99, 114–115, 124. ISBN 9780521211093.
- ^ a b c Dahl, Östen (1985). Tense and Aspect Systems. Blackwell. pp. 95, 99–101, 111.