The form of conditional used to denote a habitual past action

Abstract

Compared with the situation in other Slavic verbal systems, the use of Conditional to express habitual actions in the past constitutes a particular feature of the Croatian-Bosnian-Serbian diasystem, although not all of it. Historically, this use of Conditional apparently replaced a similar use of Imperfect in Old Slavic and Old Croatian, particularly with perfective verbs, and especially in dependent clauses, where habitual Conditional is most frequent.Perfective habitual Conditional, which is more frequent than the imperfective one, clearly "fills a gap in the system", as it explicitly denotes repeated unfinished actions in the past, as opposed to repeated unfinished actions or processes. Incontemporary language, perfective Conditional and both imperfective Conditional and imperfective Preterite are concurrent forms which function as habitual constructions. The question is raised whether factors like verbal aspect, type of iteration (mainly expressed by adverbs), a connection with another action or with an external factor in the context or situation, and the use in independent or dependentclauses influence the choice of habitual Conditional. In an attempt to answer this question, the authors investigated the use of habitual Conditional in combination with some adverbs denoting frequency, and its use in dependent clauses with the conjunctions čim and kad. The databases used were the Amsterdam Slavic Parallel Aligned Corpus (ASPAC), and the Croatian national corpus (HNK).