Abstract
This paper develops a unified analysis for the meaning of imperfective aspect that covers progressives, habituals, and counterfactuals, aiming at an understanding of two crosslinguistically frequent syncretisms: one between progressives and habituals, and one between habituals and counterfactuals. I first discuss progressive and habitual readings in detail, identifying mereological, temporal, and modal ingredients in both interpretations. My claim is that the temporal and modal ingredients are the same, and I propose to differentiate these readings in terms of verbal plurality: progressives are about singular events, and habituals are about plural events. I then extend the analysis to stative predicates, which I analyze as uncountable mass-like verbal predicates, noticing that imperfective statives tend to be formally similar to imperfective habituals. This paves the way to an analysis of the role of habitual morphology in counterfactuals. I argue that the imperfective operator is attached to a modal/stative predicate in these constructions, and that counterfactuals are about world states holding at the utterance time.
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Ferreira, M. The semantic ingredients of imperfectivity in progressives, habituals, and counterfactuals. Nat Lang Semantics 24, 353–397 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-016-9127-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-016-9127-2