Detail #186: Inverse Habitual Marking

Imagine a language where some verbs are inherently habitual, and some inherently punctual or momentane or such. The same marker serves the role of deriving the other meaning. However, with a few verbs, the verb itself carries no inherent aspect. The aspect is instead derived from contextual cues, and the aspect marker operates with regards to whichever aspect the contextual cues implied. 

Further, the language does have other aspectual, temporal, diathetical* and modal affixes. These are also contextual clues - but the position of the inverse habitual marker with regards to the position of other morphemes in the verb complex can influence the parsing as well.

Some important clues:

• with generic plural subjects (i.e. a species or class of things taken as a whole), habituals are always expected, but the interpretation is then that e.g. 'members of this class do so and so', without any necessity that the individual do it habitually - just that it's a trait of the class to do so at least once.
• passive voice tends to imply non-habitual, except with a handful of verbs (sexual ones, food-related ones and work-related ones)
• past tense in combination with perfect tends to imply non-habitual
• past tense in combination with imperfect defaults to habitual, except with a handful of verbs (for definite subjects, ones that can only be carried out once or are unlikely to happen often in a lifetime: be born, die, lose virginity, be blinded, succumb to plagues, drown, marry (for women subjects)
• if a person is mentioned with his social class or title, it is more likely to be parsed as habitual
•  ... definiteness, social views, types of action, etc, may all influence this; I see too many possibilities to start listing them all, and if I listed them all I'd end up with every verb having this. Come up with your own lists!

The combination of future tense and some evidential is parsed as follows:

X verb-fut-evidential  → I think X will verb in the future, because he habitually verbs already

X verb-fut-inverse-evidential → I think X will habitually verb in the future, because he habitually verbs already

The difference in meaning here of course is subtle: the first example simply deals with some particular future time, the latter with future taken more widely. 

* voice-related