From Habituals to Futures: Discerning the path of diachronic development

Abstract

This paper explores the problem of diachronic development of verbal forms expressing future time reference. The analysis proposed so far (Bybee et al. 1994 and, especially, Haspelmath 1998) suggest that habitual-future polysemy frequently attested across languages only emerges as a side effect of the independent development of two grammatical morphemes along the same grammaticalization path. This analysis fails to explain the distribution of a few verbal forms in Nakh-Daghestanian languages. In these languages, individual-level and stage-level predicates possess different potential as to the diachronic development of habituals: habitual grams applied to SLPs readily acquire future time reference, while those applied to ILPs retain present time reference. To account for these I propose that habituals can directly develop into futures via modality. Establishing such a grammaticalization path allows to avoid unnecessary theoretical assumptions without loosing advantages of the previous analysis, and to provide a unifies explanation to apparently unrelated facts about present-future polysemy.