Habitual constructions in Spanish

Abstract This chapter discusses the Spanish infinitival auxiliary constructions with soler and acostumbrar (a) from a Functional Discourse Grammar perspective. A preliminary description leads to hypotheses on their semantics: both constructions are expected to apply to Episodes, States-of-Affairs and Situational Properties, and soler seems to operate additionally on Proposional Contents, but without expressing genericity, contrary to what the theory predicts. These hypotheses are tested by means of a questionnaire that checks the interaction of the constructions with adverbials and other grammatical operators, and their behaviour in complement clauses. The results confirm the hypothesis regarding soler ; however, acostumbrar (a) turns out to operate maximally on the State-of-Affairs. Finally, a mutual interaction test results in acostumbrar (a) being less grammaticalized than soler .