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In this article, I examine the external and internal syntax of speech act adverbial clauses in Polish with the main focus on conditional clauses headed by the complementizer jeśli‘if’. I argue that speech act adverbial clauses radically differ from hypothetical/content conditional clauses, and that they adjoin outside the structure of the matrix clause. As far as their internal syntax is concerned, I discuss evidence showing that speech act adverbial clauses project up to JP in Krifka’s terms (2023), and can also host epistemic and evidential expressions.

The main aim of this introduction article is to give a general overview of how habituality has been investigated in the literature as a grammatical category. In doing so, we first elaborate on the question of how habituality can be characterized and what difficulties one encounters in determining its properties, which include non-contingent modal event recurrence. A brief discussion of these issues is given in Section 2. Section 3outlines selected (conceptual and formal) connections between habituality and other grammatical categories. What our observations essentially indicate is that habituality, on the one hand, closely interacts with several TAM categories, most prominently imperfective aspect and its derivatives (progressive, continuative), and also interacts in special ways with modal categories, such as the evidential or the future, on the other hand, we also observe – as has been done previously – that habituality is often not encoded overtly and can be expressed by several forms within one and the same language, and if overtly marked by a dedicated form, diachronically, it is not always stable. Finally, Section 4summarizes the most relevant findings of the articles collected in the present special issue and highlights their importance for the general discussion about habituality.