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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 30:1 (2023) ► pp.59–91

Mirative evidentials, relevance and non‑propositional meaning

ORCID logo | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
| National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

In this study, we are addressing the call for further research (Aikhenvald 2015) into how languages, in our case Modern Greek, mark the unexpected. Our first research question is: Can we identify a class of mirative evidential markers in Modern Greek? The expected answer is that we can, if we take account of frequency rates in a variety of sources in the real world, namely plays, corpora and tags in social media. The second research question is: Do these markers convey propositional or non-propositional meaning? Our findings suggest that the Greek data involves predominantly non-propositional types of meaning since mirativity is not delivered by the semantic content of the utterance (e.g., Ooo! Tí vlépoun ta mátia mou? “Oh! What do I see?”, Ma ti les tóra? “But what are you saying now?”, Ba ba ti akoúo? “Well, well, what do I hear?” Mi mou pis! ‘Don’t tell me!’).

Keywords: evidentiality, mirativity, emotion, surprise, showing-meaning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mirative evidentiality
  • 3.The showing-meaning continuum
  • 4.The data
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Rationale
    • 5.2Sources of data
      • 5.2.1Plays
      • 5.2.2Corpora
      • 5.2.3Interviews and tags in social media
    • 5.3Procedure of analysis
  • 6.Results
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22012.ifa
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