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Article published In:
The Linguistic Expression of Mirativity
Edited by Agnès Celle and Anastasios Tsangalidis
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15:2] 2017
► pp. 460–488

Mirative fronting in German

Experimental evidence

| University of Konstanz

This paper presents an examination of syntactic constructions that are associated with the mirative interpretation of marking propositional content as being surprising or unexpected to the speaker. I report experimental evidence showing that certain options of marked word order in German are particularly suitable in mirative contexts. Cross-linguistic evidence offers good reasons to assume that mirative marking is also reflected in word order patterns. Having identified word order variation as one option to trigger mirative interpretations of utterances, I discuss the issue of distinguishing between information-structural and mirative effects of marked syntactic configurations.

Keywords: acceptability study, information structure, mirative fronting, word order
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The notion of mirative fronting
  • 3.Mirative fronting: Experimental evidence
    • Materials
    • Participants
    • Results
  • 4.The distinct character of mirative fronting
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.2.07tro
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