Usitative

[Scott DeLancey]

On Tue, 16 May 2006, Mia Kalish wrote:

> I am about to say that the usitative is a semantic function in English – as
> opposed to a grammatical function in Diné Bizaad. In Diné Bizaad, the
> usitative is very Bayesian, while in English, people specify with particular
> words such as usual, customary. (Regularly is repetitive rather than
> usitative).

English has it as a semi-grammatical category in the past tense:

	We used to [usta] go there all the time.

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html