University of Helsinki

This monograph employs a substantialist approach in examining the specific use of the verbs znati and um(j)eti in the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian language(s) as auxiliaries that denote habitual, characteristic or sporadic activity. Drawing from corpus and questionnaire data, the study provides a syntactic description of such use and analyses its semantic content in the light of universal categories of tense, mood and aspect. Theories of grammaticalisation are applied in a discussion of possible explanations for the development of this use from other meanings of the lexemes znati and um(j)eti.