STUF 2019; 72(1): 21–66 Kilu von Prince*, Ana Krajinović, Anna Margetts, Nick Thieberger and Valérie Guérin Habituality in four Oceanic languages of Melanesia https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2019-0002 Abstract: Our knowledge about tense, aspect and modality (TMA) in the Oceanic languages of Melanesia has so far been severely limited by the lack of available data. Habituality in particular, as one of the less described TMA categories, has not yet been widely discussed for this group of languages. Based on corpus data and elicitations, we give a detailed overview of four languages, identifying common trends and addressing specific questions of general concern. These include the relation of habituality to (im)perfectivity and the relation between habituality and irrealis. Keywords: aspect, Oceanic, reduplication, modality 1 Introduction The Oceanic language family roughly includes between 450 (Lynch et al. 2002) and 520 (Hammarström et al. 2017) individual languages. Most of them are spoken in Melanesia, specifically in Papua New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. In contrast to some of the bigger Oceanic languages of Polynesia such as Samoan or Maori, most of the Oceanic languages of Melanesia are spoken by relatively small communities of speakers, often do not have a standardized variety, a written tradition, or official status. Accordingly, they are often comparatively under-documented. *Corresponding author: Kilu von Prince, Institut für Deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany, E-mail:
[email protected]. Ana Krajinović, Institut für Deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany, E-mail:
[email protected].