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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. 540–575

An enunciative account of admirativity in Bulgarian

| LACITO, CNRS

In this paper, I will discuss the status of the so-called admirative in the Bulgarian grammatical system, with special focus on its relation to the perfect, evidentiality and inferentiality. I will argue that admirative constructions in Bulgarian are better analyzed within the framework of the strict theory of enunciation (Bally, Benveniste, Culioli, Desclés…). In the first part of this paper, I will focus on the morphological patterns specific to Bulgarian and discuss the semantics of the phenomenon. I will also survey other analyses of the issue. In the second part, I will demonstrate that the surprise expressed by admirative constructions, marked by exclamatory intonation and clearly identified by context, exclamatory particles and interjections, results from the discrepancy between what is expected and what is observed.

Keywords: (ad)mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, Balkan linguistic area, Bulgarian l-participle, Perfect, surprise, inferentiality, abductive and deductive reasoning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The term admirative in the Balkans
  • 3.On l-participle forms and their classification in the Bulgarian verb system
  • 4.Interaction with other grammatical categories
  • 5.Admirative usages
    • 5.1Introduction
    • 5.2Admirative meanings: An enunciative analysis
  • 6.Admirative: Connections to tenses
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations used in glosses
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.2.10gue
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