Abstract:

In this paper, we investigate whether expressions of habituality in UK English, in particular adverbs of event distribution and the auxiliaries used to and would, pertain to hierarchically different layers of semantic organization, in the sense that they would have different portions of the semantic structure in their scope. This question is addressed using the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar. The application of the Complement Clause Test and the Scope Test reveals that indeed habituality operates at three different layers: adverbs of event distribution operate at the layer of the Configurational Property, used to at the next higher layer, that of the State of Affairs, and would at the next higher layer, that of the Episode.

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