Hab and Gen in the Expression of Habituality

The chapter shows that habituality is expressed in natural language by various combinations of modal and aspectual operators. It is argued on the basis of English habitual forms (the simple form, periphrastic used to and would) that two different modal operators may be found in the expression of habituality: Gen, which is the operator in Krifka et al. (1995), and Hab, an operator which depends on summation of events in all the accessible worlds of a gnomic modal base. Hab, unlike Gen, which quantifies over events, is thus dispositional. It is further shown how Hab and Gen interact with mood and two different aspectual dimensions: a viewpoint aspect distinction between imperfective and perfective, and a perspective distinction between internal and external (retrospective) perspective, to derive the division of labor between the forms.