Habitual sentences with costumar ‘use to’: Issues of tense and interaction with frequentative adjuncts

• Published in: Journal of portuguese linguistics Vol. 23; no. 1
• Main Author: Moia, Telmo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 18-10-2024
• ISSN: 2397-5563; 2397-5563
• DOI: 10.16995/jpl.11753

This paper analyses the expression of habitual values in Portuguese, focusing on the auxiliary verb costumar ‘use to’. First, the concept of habituality (and its distinction from genericity, frequentativity, and iterativity) is discussed, and an overview of the various ways of signalling habituality in Portuguese is provided. Then, three topics take centre stage, one concerning tense and two concerning the interaction of costumar with temporal adjuncts of different types. With regard to tense, the versatility of the imperfective past of costumar is examined, noting that this tense form can convey values which are typically reserved to the perfective past and the pluperfect. Regarding the interaction with adjuncts, the combination of costumar with adjuncts that redundantly express habituality (e.g., habitualmente ‘usually’) is first addressed. Subsequently, the combination of costumar with a set of allied adjuncts, grouped under the cover term ‘frequentative’, is scrutinized. These include adjuncts that indicate whether exceptions to the habitual pattern are more or less frequent (e.g., muitas vezes ‘often’ vs. às vezes ‘sometimes’), and adjuncts expressing correlation between eventualities, frequency sensu stricto, or cyclicity (e.g., uma vez por semana ‘once a week’). Portuguese is systematically compared with English throughout the text. The neo-Reichenbachian framework of Discourse Representation Theory (Hans Kamp) is used for formal analyses.