Cagliari, Italy  15-18 September 2003

ALT V Conference

Sonia Cristofaro

Past habituals and irrealis.
Sonia.cristofaro@unipv.it

This papers presents the results of a cross-linguistic investigation of habituality, focusing on the connection between habituality and irrealis, intended as any type of unactualized situation.

A number of languages use the same verb forms to express habituality and various types of unactualized situation, as manifested for instance in hypothetical, future, debitive, potential and interrogative constructions.
This fact has been explained in the literature in terms of the semantic nature of habituals, i.e. the non-definiteness of habitual situations.
Habituals do not refer to any particular actualized instance of the relevant situations, hence the latter may be conceptualized in the same way as unactualized situations.

Cross-linguistic investigation shows however that the association between habituality and irrealis takes place in the past rather than in the present. If habituality in the present is expressed in the same way as irrealis (for instance by means of potentials, debitives, interrogatives, conditionals, futures, subjunctives and the like), then so is habituality in the past, while the reverse does not hold. For instance, there are languages where habituality in the past is expressed by means of forms also used for potentials (Gurr-goni) or interrogatives (Xakas). However, habituality in the present is expressed by forms not used for irrealis.

The association between habituality in the past and irrealis is attested in enough genetically and geographically unrelated languages to be a typologically significant phenomenon (some such languages are Bargam, Etsako, Gurr-Goni, Tamil, Tolkapaia Yavapalai, Xakas, and several Indo-European languages). Moreover, the forms expressing irrealis and habituality in the past show considerable structural and functional diversity cross-linguistically. The only commonality between these forms is that they express habituality in the past and some kind of unactualized situation. This suggests that there must be some specific connection between habituality in the past and irrealis in general, not between habituality in the past and some particular type of unactualized situation.

This paper argues that this connection rests on two basic functional principles, (i) the non-definiteness of habitual situations, which leads to the association between habituals and irrealis in general, and (ii) the fact that past habitual situations do not hold in the present any more. It seems reasonable to assume that in principle a situation that does not hold in the present any more is more susceptible of being associated with unactualized situations than one still holding in the present. Thus, if a language associates habituals with irrealis at all, it does so at least
for the situations that are most susceptible of being associated with unactualized situations, i.e. the ones expressed by past habituals.