1.1. Topic and structure

This paper analyses the expression of habitual values in Portuguese, focusing on the use of the auxiliary verb costumar, which has very intriguing grammatical properties. This Portuguese verb is a close counterpart of the English verb use to – cf. (2) –, although the latter does not occur in deictic contexts, since it only has past tense inflection. The adverb usually normally translates costumar in deictic contexts – cf. (1) –, but for simplicity I will always gloss costumar with ‘use to’ in this paper.

In section 2, the general concept of habituality is discussed, separating it from allied concepts such as atemporal genericity, frequentativity and iterativity. In this section, an overview of the different ways of grammatically signalling habitual values, with an emphasis on those used in Portuguese, and on the differences between Portuguese and English, is provided. Adverbs (e.g., habitualmente ‘usually’), auxiliary verbs (e.g., costumar ‘use to’), and complex verbal expressions with adjectival or nominal bases (e.g., ser habitual ‘be usual’, ter o hábito ‘be in the habit’) are mentioned. The somehow unique grammatical properties of the verb costumar are briefly introduced here.

In section 3, the exceptional versatility of the imperfective past of costumar is scrutinized. Notably, the imperfective past forms of this auxiliary verb (e.g., costumava_3SG) can also convey semantic values typically reserved to the perfective past and the pluperfect. As we will see, past perfective forms of costumar (e.g., costumou_3SG),¹ as well as pluperfect forms (e.g., costumara_3SG, tinha costumado_3SG), are almost never used.

In the brief section 4, the combination of costumar with adjuncts that only redundantly reiterate habitual values (e.g., costumar habitualmente ‘usually use to’) is presented and shortly discussed.

In the much longer section 5, the combination of costumar with a set of allied adjuncts, commonly grouped under the cover term ‘frequentative’ is scrutinized. These include, on the one hand, adjuncts that signal the ‘strength of the habit’, i.e., whether exceptions to habitual patterns are more or less frequent (e.g., costumar sempre ‘always use to’ vs. costumar muitas vezes ‘often use to’ vs. costumar às vezes ‘sometimes use to’), and, on the other hand, adjuncts that convey repeated action values analogous to habituality, namely, correlation between eventualities (e.g., costumar sempre que… ‘use to whenever’), frequency sensu stricto (e.g., costumar duas vezes por semana ‘use to twice a week’), and cyclicity (e.g., costumar de dois em dois dias ‘use to every two days’).

2.1. Basic distinctions

In the literature, the terms ‘habitual’, and ‘habituality’, are not always used with the same meaning, and to cover exactly the same type of grammatical constructions. However, it has generally been assumed that they involve the repetition of episodic eventualities with a certain regularity:

“habitual sentences… are typically described as ‘making reference’ to some regular, repeated activity or event” (Carlson, 2012, p. 829);

“habitual sentences intuitively generalise over patterns of events” (Krifka et al., 1995, p. 17).

Consequently, habitual predications are distinguished from episodic stative predications, both individual-level and stage-level (like o Pedro é francês ‘Pedro is French’, o Pedro sabe falar francês ‘Pedro can speak French’, o Pedro está constipado ‘Pedro has a cold’), and from atemporal generic predications, sometimes referred to as gnomic (like dois mais dois são quatro ‘two plus two is four’, um quarque é uma partícula subatómica elementar dotada de carga elétrica ‘a quark is a subatomic elementary particle with an electric charge’, os pinguins não voam ‘penguins don’t fly’), which do not involve any form of repetition.³ They are also distinguished from predications sometimes called iterative (cf., e.g., Comrie, 1976, p. 27; Carlson, 2012, pp. 829–830; and, for Portuguese, Cunha 2006b [2015], pp. 211–218). These (implicitly or explicitly) express the mere repetition of eventualities, without taking into account regularities, or repeating patterns, but rather considering repetition as an intrinsic component of plural eventualities (like a gaivota bateu as asas antes de levantar voo ‘the seagull flapped its wings before taking off’, o Pedro bateu à porta duas vezes antes de entrar ‘Peter knocked on the door twice before entering’).

One domain where the boundaries of habituality are not so clear is that of frequentative expressions, in a very broad sense of the term, such as muitas vezes ‘often’, sempre ‘always’, sempre que (chove) ‘whenever (it rains)’, duas vezes por semana ‘twice a week’. Carlson (2012), for example, considers that sentences with often can be subsumed within the class of habitual predications (they are “habituals where the activity [forming the basis of the habitual] must occur with judged high frequency”, p. 830), but he does not take a stand on all the relevant adjuncts. Mateus et al. (1989, p. 93, n. 3), for Portuguese, distinguish the habitual aspectual value sensu stricto from a value they call ‘frequentativo’ (‘frequentative’), a term I borrow here, associated with adjuncts such as muitas vezes ‘often’ or frequentemente ‘frequently’. I will adopt this division as well. To be more precise, I will use the following distinctions in this paper (ignoring terminological and/or taxonomic variation in the literature):⁴

• – prototypical habitual predications, which can have explicit habituality markers (such as the verb costumar, or the adverb habitualmente, comparable to the English forms used to and usually), or can occur without explicit markers (e.g., using the so-called ‘habitual present’ or ‘habitual imperfective past’, as we will see later);

• – frequentative predications, in a very broad sense of the term, distinguishing the following four subclasses:

  • (i)  predications with universal and vague frequentative adjuncts, usually referred to as quantificational adverbs – e.g., sempre ‘always’, muitas vezes ‘often’, às vezes ‘sometimes’, raramente ‘rarely’;

  • (ii)  predications with universally quantified temporal adjuncts, either involving direct quantification over intervals – e.g., todas as sextas-feiras ‘every Friday’ –, or quantification over eventualities, in what can more perspicuously be termed ‘adjuncts of correlation between eventualities’ – e.g., sempre que X, Y ‘whenever X, Y’; quando X, Y ‘when X, Y’;

  • (iii)  predications with frequency adjuncts sensu stricto – e.g., n vezes por semana ‘n times a week’;

  • (iv)  predications with cyclicity adjuncts – e.g., de X em X dias ‘every X days’, dia sim dia não ‘every other day’.

The combination of costumar, an explicit marker of habituality, with expressions from each of these four subclasses of frequentatives is relatively common, and is one of the central topics of this paper (to be dissected in section 5).

2.2. The semantic interpretation of habitual sentences – essential facts

Semantically, habitual sentences have been treated – mainly since the seminal works on discourse structure by Hans Kamp (1981) and Irene Heim (1982) – using tripartite conditions involving a restrictor and a nuclear scope (cf., e.g., Carlson, 1989; Hajičová, Partee & Sgall, 1998; Krifka et al., 1995, 23ff.). The conditions included in the restrictor can be strictly temporal, i.e., involving intervals or units of time, or situational, i.e., involving eventualities (generally of the type described in the sentence), or even – as a third possibility – involving ‘cases’ sensu Lewis (1975).

Bennett and Partee (2004 [1978], pp. 83–84) underscore different usage variants of the adverb usually, which apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Portuguese verb costumar: a sentence like John usually wears a turban (= o John costuma andar de turbante) can be paraphrased as ‘for most days of the week (temporal restrictor), it is true that John wears a turban on that day (nuclear scope)’; differently, a sentence like Tai usually eats with chopsticks (= os tailandenses costumam comer com pauzinhos) can be paraphrased as ‘on most occasions when Tai eat (situational restrictor), they do so with chopsticks (nuclear scope)’; finally, a sentence like a quadratic equation usually has two different solutions (= uma equação de segundo grau costuma ter duas soluções distintas) can be paraphrased as ‘in most cases (restrictor), a second-degree equation has two solutions (nuclear scope)’, with the restriction clearly being neither temporal nor situational, since equations are not anchored in time.

Sometimes it is possible to include elements from different constituents of the habitual sentence in the restrictor, or to include unexpressed inferred elements of various kinds: as Krifka et al. (1995, p. 46) state, “the contents of a restrictor can vary widely”. This variation is furthermore the source of ambiguities, which are frequent in habitual sentences. Observe, for instance, a sentence like o Paulo costuma beber Coca-Cola Zero ‘Paulo usually drinks Coke Zero’, which can be paraphrased as ‘Paulo is a habitual Coke Zero consumer’, or as ‘whenever Paulo drinks Coke (which he might not do often), he usually drinks Coke Zero, not the others types of Coke’. It is also worth emphasising that habitual predications often do not include any explicit information about the restrictor, as in the case of Mary smokes, but that information is assumed by the interlocutors by ‘accommodation’ (cf. Krifka et al., 1995, 56); Ferreira (2016, pp. 362, 378) contends that this type of sentences, for which he uses the term ‘simple habituals’ are of a totally different sort, and should not be treated with tripartite structures. I will not discuss this issue here.

Despite what has been said about tripartite structures, for simplicity’s sake, I will sometimes use the binary operator HAB to refer to the habitual predications, in simplified formulae of the type [ev = HAB (ev′)] (i.e., without emphasising its tripartite character, involving quantification with a restrictor and a nuclear scope).

Another crucial aspect of the semantic interpretation of habitual sentences is time location. Habits can be located in time.⁵ They involve an interval, typically a long one, in which the habit is assumed to exist (t_HAB). As Boneh and Doron (2008, p. 19) point out:

“Habituals are characterized by iterativity over a relatively long duration. Intuitively, a long period is needed in order to construe an iterated event as a regular pattern that may count as a habit. … the interval must be long enough so as to be in principle unbounded, such that any event satisfying [a predicate] P could be followed by yet another event satisfying P.”

The ‘interval of the habit’ can be explicitly mentioned, through certain time adjuncts, as in the following two examples, with the Portuguese counterparts of since- and when-phrases, respectively:

However, as is abundantly underlined in the literature, the interval where a habit is assumed to persist is often merely implicit: an isolated phrase like o Pedro costuma deitar-se tarde ‘Pedro is in the habit of going to bed late’/‘Pedro usually goes to bed late’ describes a habit that exists throughout a past interval extending up to the utterance time, whose beginning does not have to be specified (and whose end is not in question).

2.3. Grammatical markers of habituality in Portuguese (and English) – overall view

In Portuguese, as in English and many other languages, habituality can be expressed in various ways. With respect to habitual sentences, two main cases should be distinguished: the presence of habituality without explicit grammatical markers of this value, and the presence of habituality explicitly triggered by grammatical markers.

Portuguese grammatical tradition, like many others, has often associated the presence of habituality in sentences without explicit adverbial markers with the use of specific verb tenses, for instance, the so-called ‘habitual present’ (cf. (5)), or ‘habitual imperfective past’ (cf. (6)), which would allegedly be direct triggers of the values in question (cf., e.g., Oliveira, 2013, pp. 514, 521–522).

However, it is important to emphasise that virtually all other verb tenses are compatible with the expression of habituality – cf. (7)–(9) –, and that habitual values can even exist in clauses with non-finite verb forms – cf. (10)–(11).

This fact challenges the hypothesis of a direct link between form and semantic value, involving verb inflection and habituality marking. The unlikelihood of such direct association is clearly stated by several authors for English – cf., e.g., Carlson (2012, p. 833), or Michaelis (2006, p. 13); the latter, using ‘generic’ as a cover term that includes habituals, claims:

“[Östen] Dahl [in his 1995 paper ‘The Marking of the Episodic/Generic Distinction in Tense-Aspect Systems’] has assumed that there is a single marker of genericity in each of the languages in his study, taking the present tense to be the ‘generic marker’ for English. This appears to be a mistake, however, as generic statements can be expressed by a number of other tense-aspect combinations. These include the simple past and past progressive, as exemplified in [Dogs chased cars in those days, and during that summer parents were keeping their children indoors] …, respectively.” Michaelis (2006, p. 13)

In the same line, Krifka et al. (1995) postulate a “covert generic operator” (p. 53), which is introduced “at some point in the syntactic derivation” (p. 39), and claim that the “characterizing sentences… often are not clearly marked. Sentences with verbal predicates in the simple present tense, the past tense or the future can (in English) have… a characterizing… interpretation” (p. 6).

I also believe that it is more reasonable to assume that habituality values occur without explicit marking in Portuguese, in sentences like (5) through (11) above.

On the other hand, languages normally have a set of explicit markers of habituality, which in Portuguese include, most notably (see also Cunha, 2006a, p. 340; Cunha, 2006b [2015], p. 223–224):

1. adverbs such as habitualmente ‘usually’;

2. the auxiliary verb costumar ‘use to’, which is the focus of this paper;

3. verbal expressions with a nominal or an adjectival base (related to the Latin etyma habitus, usus or consuetudo) such as ter o hábito [have_INF the habit], ter por hábito [have_INF by habit], ser habitual [be_INF habitual], ser usual [be_INF usual], ser hábito [be_INF habit], ser costume [be_INF custom]

Just to have an idea of their relative prevalence: in cetempúblico, costumar has approx. 7,200 records, habitualmente approx. 5,100 records, and ter o hábito and ter por hábito approx. 200 records each.

Compare sentence (12), with the so-called ‘habitual present’, with the subsequent roughly equivalent four sentences, containing explicit markers of habituality:⁶

In English, the same three types of markers exist (cf., e.g., Krifka et al., 1995, p. 7). Let us briefly consider each subtype, and the correspondence between English and Portuguese.

The closest English counterpart of the adverb habitualmente is usually. Portuguese also uses usualmente, a cognate of English usually, but much less frequently. In the British National Corpus, there are 209 records of habitually vs. 18,711 records of usually (99%); in cetempúblico, the frequency of the cognates is reversed: 5,149 records of habitualmente (95%) vs. 243 records of usualmente.

As for auxiliary verbs comparable to costumar, English often resorts to use to.⁷ However, this English expression has a peculiarity that sets it apart from costumar: it is almost exclusively used in the simple past (used to, did use to) to refer to past habits, i.e., with a value comparable to the Portuguese imperfective past costumava.⁸ Present habits in English are not signalled with use to, but rather with other strategies, e.g., present tense only, or present tense together with usually. Contrariwise, Portuguese regularly uses the verb costumar in the present tense to represent present habits. As we will see later, in cetempúblico, there are approx. 5,800 records of costumar in the present tense (to signal present habits), corresponding to 80% of all uses of this verb in the corpus.

English also has a few complex verbal expressions related to the same Latin etyma: be in the habit of, have a habit of (close counterparts of Portuguese ter o/por hábito); be usual, be customary, be habitual (morpho-syntactically parallel to Portuguese ser habitual, and ser usual); be the custom (morpho-syntactically parallel to Portuguese ser costume, and ser hábito).⁹ There may be significant differences in frequency (and sometimes distribution) of the Portuguese and English morpho-syntactically parallel forms, which I will not address here. The comparison between these forms in the two languages, targeting possible translation problems, is an interesting topic that I leave for future investigation.

As has already been briefly mentioned, there is also a set of frequentative adjuncts that could arguably be classified as habitual in a very broad sense of the term, but which I prefer to categorise separately, as stated above, in 2.1. In this group. I include three expressions – geralmente ‘generally’, normalmente ‘normally’, and por norma ‘normally’ (literally ‘by norm’) –, for which the dividing line between habituals and frequentatives is exceptionally tenuous.¹⁰

To end this introductory subsection, I will note that, interestingly, speakers exploit the various grammatical possibilities of encoding habitual values for the sake of discourse (and stylistic) diversity. It is not uncommon, for instance, to find different strategies of explicitly marking habituality in close proximity (in subordination, coordination, or juxtaposition):

There is similar variation involving structures with and without explicit markers of habituality, that is, sentences with the so-called ‘habitual present’ or ‘habitual imperfective past’ often occur in very close proximity to sentences with explicit markers (such as costumar, or habitualmente):

2.4. The expression of habituality with the Portuguese verb costumar

The auxiliary verb costumar has unique properties. It can be analysed as a unary predicate whose single argument is sentential, and behaves like a subject raising verb, as any other auxiliary verb. The status of costumar as a raising auxiliary verb can be confirmed (among other things) by the possibility of combining it with verbs that have no external argument, i.e., with an expletive subject: costuma amanhecer antes das 6 ‘it usually dawns before 6’; costumava chover mais nesta região ‘it used to rain more in this region’; não costuma haver problemas ‘there are usually no problems’.

In Peres’ (1993, pp. 6–7) binary typology of aspectual auxiliary verbs, which includes ‘situation reducers’ (those that circumscribe “the initial part, a middle part, or the final part or a resultant state” of eventualities) and ‘situation iterators’ (those that create derived complex eventualities by iteration), costumar stands out as the only verb that acts exclusively as a ‘situation iterator’, being unable to operate as a ‘situation reducer’.¹¹

We can consider that sentences with costumar identify habitual eventualities (ev), in which a pattern of more or less regular or frequent repetition of the episodic situations described in the verb argument (ev′) is assumed: in a simplified way, [ev = HAB (ev′)]. Descriptions of habitual eventualities, or habits, are generally classified in the literature as stative (cf., e.g., Moens, 1987, p. 60; Smith, 1991, p. 39; Krifka et al., 1995, p. 36; Huddleston, 2002, p. 124; Cunha, 2006a, p. 343ff.; Cunha, 2006b [2015], p. 223ff.).

Episodic situations of various Aktionsart types can be repeated, and get a habitual interpretation, hence being describable via costumar. See the following four examples, which illustrate the combination with a (non-permanent) state, an activity, an accomplishment, and an achievement, respectively:¹²

The verb costumar is also frequently used in negative sentences to refer to the absence of habits. The negation of habits can be referred to in two different ways which converge in the same interpretation: with the negation operator in the higher proposition, applied to costumar, as in (28) and (30), and with the negation operator in the lower proposition, applied to the main verb, as in (29) and (31). (28) and (29) are totally equivalent sentences. A similar phenomenon is observed in English.¹³ The first construction is extremely common in Portuguese, while the second is relatively infrequent.¹⁴

The negation of habits with costumar and the implicative negative operator nem ‘not even’ – cf. (32) – is common, but with costumar and the negative operator sem ‘without’ seems not to be fully grammatical (and there are no records of this combination in cetempúblico):¹⁵

I will return to the use of costumar in negative sentences at the end of section 5.1 (apropos the combination nunca costumar ‘never use to’).

As was already mentioned, habits – identified by costumar, or by other means – can be located in time, like other stative situations. There are present habits, past habits, and future habits. However, only the representation of present and past habits is common with costumar (or with similar predicative expressions, such as ter o hábito ‘be in the habit’), with the verb typically in the present or in the imperfective past, respectively.

The reference to future habits, which is rather infrequent in general (in Portuguese as in English, and possibly other languages), is not usually made with the use of costumar (or ter o hábito, for that matter). This is a somewhat puzzling fact. I will not attempt to formulate an explanatory hypothesis here, but this is certainly a topic worthy of future investigation.

The description of past habits, as in (34), is of particular interest for grammatical analysis, and will be the topic of the next section.

5.1. Costumar and universal or vague frequentative adjuncts

5.2. Costumar and universally quantified temporal adjuncts, adjuncts of frequency sensu stricto and adjuncts of cyclicity