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To complement existing synchronic typological studies of the marking strategies of (past) habituality, this paper details the diachronic paths leading to and from past habitual constructions. The rich corpus evidence from the diachrony of Ancient Greek demonstrates at least four source constructions: (1) past counterfactual mood (in optative and indicative), (2) futures in the past, (3) iteratives (with -sk) and (4) lexical sources with semantic affinity to habituality (volition, habit, love). It is argued that the former two acquire habitual meaning through an invited inference of epistemic certainty of the statement by the speaker: what certainly would have happened in the knowable past is implied to be characteristic of the past. The past forms with the so-called iterative -sk (3) suffix follow the cross-linguistically frequent evolution of pluractional constructions through a form of semantic bleaching: past iterative > frequentative > habitual > habitual imperfective. Lexical sources (4) first acquire habitual meaning in the present after which only the more heavily grammaticalized ones receive past habitual usage through semantic bleaching and generalization of usage (as reflected by host class expansions). The paper is concluded with a diachronic map of these paths into habituality and the paths leading from past habituality into other domains such as genericity.

This article discusses the grammaticalization of the habitual auxiliaries εἴωθα, φιλέω, ἐθέλω and νομίζω in Archaic and Classical Greek. I aim to (1) provide a more complete understanding of the Ancient Greek expressions of habituality; (2) distinguish clearly between habitual aspect and (possibly diachronically) related semantic categories such as iterativity and genericity; (3) demonstrate the usefulness of grammaticalization and collocation criteria to measure the relative degree of grammaticalization of the habitual auxiliaries. I argue that their degree of grammaticalization can be measured by whether they have developed past uses, undergone a diachronic collocation shift to inanimate subjects and, subsequently, stative infinitives, and whether they have acquired an anti-present implicature. Finally, I suggest that habitual ἐθέλω occurred already in Archaic Greek and was the source for the futurity use that it developed in Classical Greek.

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Picking up on the notion of “rephilologization” promoted by the editors of the 2020 volume Postclassical Greek as a recurring theme in the book under consideration here, I offer in this review article an overview and critique of the ways in which philological analysis intersects with grammatical and diachronic analysis in the 12 studies contained in this work. In addition, I discuss various pitfalls and principles for progress in analysing Greek in its Postclassical instantiations.