Habituality and va-Verbs in Czech A Fresh Take on an Old Approach

This chapter presents the results of applying a feature-based approach to explain the functioning of a special verb class in Czech, that usually have the suffix ‑va‑. The meaning of these verbs is primarily one of iterativty/frequentatvity—repeated events –, and also habituality, but the exact functioning seems complex, amongst other things regarding the rate or regularity of the repetition. After Kopečný (1965), we have taken non-actuality as their core semantic feature; adding further features, we analyse native speaker input, and corpus/internet sourced examples. Context, adverbials, etc. account for the foregrounding/backgrounding of the inherent features.