Progressivity and habituality in Shumcho.

This article is concerned with some features of the tempo-aspectual system of Shumcho, a small West Himalayish (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken in a few villages in the district Kinnaur (State of Himachal Pradesh) in the Indian Himalayas, and provides a descriptive account of the language's strategies to express progressive or habitual action and the effects of the respective markers with various types of predicates. I also consider the semantic (evidential) properties of the copulas and their interaction with the aspect/tense system, and offer some thoughts on the historical development of imperfective and perfective constructions as met in the present-day language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]