Habitual constructions in Ancient Greek

Abstract In this paper, I tease apart the semantic differences between three major habitual constructions in Ancient Greek (8th–4th centuries BCE): (1) a suffixal construction that uses the mislabelled “iterative” suffix with past tenses, (2) a modal past habitual which had developed out of a past counterfactual, and (3) habitual auxiliaries with sources in ‘volition’, ‘love’ and ‘custom’ predicates. Using collocational tests with absolute and relative temporal modifiers and qualificational aspect from a typological questionnaire, I point out the differences between these strategies, as, for example, some express participant-oriented propensity habituality whereas others are polyfunctional, expressing both a single and a series of habitual States-of-Affairs. Also, based on the evidence from my diachronic corpus, I demonstrate that these meanings are diachronically related.