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The Form of Conditional used to Denote a Habitual Past Action

Compared with the situation in other Slavic verbal systems, the use of
Conditional to express habitual actions in the past constitutes a particular feature of
the Croatian-Bosnian-Serbian diasystem, although not all of it. Historically, this use
of Conditional apparently replaced a similar use of Imperfect in Old Slavic and Old
Croatian, particularly with perfective verbs, and especially in dependent clauses,
where habitual Conditional is most frequent.
Perfective habitual Conditional, which is more frequent than the imperfective
one, clearly "fills a gap in the system", as it explicitly denotes repeated finished
actions in the past, as opposed to repeated unfinished actions or processes. In
contemporary language, perfective Conditional and both imperfective Conditional
and imperfective Preterite are concurrent forms which function as habitual
constructions. The question is raised whether factors like verbal aspect, type of
iteration (mainly expressed by adverbs), a connection with another action or with an
external factor in the context or situation, and the use in independent or dependent clauses influence the choice of habitual Conditional. In an attempt to answer this
question, the authors investigated the use of habitual Conditional in combination
with some adverbs denoting frequency, and its use in dependent clauses with the
conjunctions čim and kad. The databases used were the Amsterdam Slavic Parallel
Aligned Corpus (ASPAC), and the Croatian national corpus (HNK).