STATIVES, PROGRESSIVES, AND HABITUALS - ANALOGIES AND DIFFERENCES

This paper scrutinizes the proposals put forth by a number of scholars, to the effect that both progressives and habituals are stative. None of the reasons advanced in the literature appears to be compelling. On the contrary, there are stringent theoretical reasons to reject these claims, which seem to merge notions belonging to quite different subdomains of tense and aspect semantics. Indeed, the notion ''stative'' belongs to the subdomain of actionality, while ''progressive'' and ''habitual'' belong to the subdomain of aspect. It can easily be shown that stative verbs may take on any aspectual value, including the two under discussion. As to the progressive and habitual aspects, they may readily apply to nonstative verbs, in which case they show properties very different from stative verbs, even when the latter are used in progressive or habitual contexts. Thus, the proposals under scrutiny are rejected as an instance of categorical confusion. There is, however, a sense in which the suggestion that habituals are stative may be retained. This is when a particular subset of habituals, here called ''attitudinals,'' is concerned. Attitudinals refer to situations in which the repeated occurrence of a given event is taken to be the defining property of an individual or object. It is shown that attitudinals consist of ''activities'' (in the Vendlerian sense) that are contextually turned into permanent statives.