Expressions of habituality in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This paper analyses three different types of habitual expressions: (i) the imperfect and (ii) the adverb sempre ‘always’ for marking habituality in the past, and (iii) two periphrastic constructions that are not restricted to specific temporal contexts. The imperfect is used typically in narrative descriptions of past events and situations; and the lexical expression sempre interacts in different ways with the imperfect and the simple past, creating implicatures concerning the continuation of the habit at the moment of speaking. Of the two periphrases, the infinitive construction with costumar ‘usually [do]’ is a dedicated expression of habituality, while the supposedly habitual construction with viver ‘live’ has a frequentative rather than a habitual meaning. The analysis of these expressions points towards a definition of habituality as a situation or a series of events that are characteristic of an (extended) stretch of time, which means that although habituals typically involve the iteration of events with human referents, this need not be the case