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The Linguistic Expression of Mirativity
Edited by Agnès Celle and Anastasios Tsangalidis
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15:2] 2017
► pp. 312–342

Problematizing mirativity

| Arizona State University

There are many excellent descriptions of mirativity in various language grammars, and more recently there has been a flurry of research refining mirativity to include how languages linguistically realize surprise and related concepts such as ‘unexpectedness’ and ‘new information’. However, there is currently no commonly accepted set of independently motivated diagnostics for testing mirativity that utilizes the best practices and first principles of semantic and pragmatic investigation. As such, the goal of this paper is to go back to basics and examine mirativity from the point of view of a field linguist who has been given the task of discovering and documenting how a speaker of a language linguistically expresses her surprise. This approach rests on two premises: first, mirativity is about surprise in the psychological sense. The second premise is that we take seriously that mirativity involves a kind of meaning, and that all languages have the linguistic resources for communicating mirative (surprise) meaning. The outcome is a set of tests that can be used to probe mirative meanings in any language.

Keywords: surprise, implicature, entailment, semantic and pragmatic fieldwork, Gitksan
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art
    • 2.1A brief history and synthesis
    • 2.2(Non-)parasitic mirativity
    • 2.3A critical evaluation
  • 3.Semantic and pragmatic fieldwork
    • 3.1Tests for mirative meaning
    • 3.2A test case: Grammatical evidential in Gitksan
      • 3.2.1The witnessing heuristic
      • 3.2.2Challengeability in English
      • 3.2.3Embeddability and displacement
  • 4.Summary and moving forward with mirativity
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.2.02pet
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