The semantics of habituality as an argument for event-mediated quantification

The goals of this paper are two-fold. On the one hand, it has as its aim an analysis of the semantics of habituality in the framework of event semantics. In particular, it will be argued that a proper treatment of habituality must minimally meet the following desiderata: (a) allow a unified analysis of the habitual and the progressive as different subtypes of the imperfective, (b) work both for bare habituals and for habituals that contain certain kinds of quantificational elements, and (c) be able to model the scope behavior of indefinites in habituals of both types. Based on various existing proposals, an analysis along these lines will be put forward and formalized. On the other hand, the paper also seeks to show that a habitual semantics that meets these desiderata cannot be implemented in combination with a classical GQ analysis of quantificational DPs, but follows without any additional stipulations if an event-based approach to quantification is adopted. Thus, habituals provide a further argument in favor of modeling distributive quantification with the mediation of events