Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2017

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.

This paper studies degrees of mirativity as grammaticalised in the Indo-Aryan language Odia by four light verb constructions, asymmetric complex predicates combining a lexical verb with a (partially) bleached light verb. As such, these light verb constructions can be considered non-parasitic expressions of mirativity. The present paper adds a number of important new insights to the discussion of mirativity. Firstly, we show that mirativity is a complex category which, next to the prototypical notion of surprise, also comprises the notion of “unsupposedness”. Secondly, we demonstrate that the four constructions vary in the degree of mirativity they express. These differences can be related to features of transitivity, such as volitionality or control and affectedness (as contextually realised by the process size, impact, force, or scope). This hypothesis is confirmed by two corpus studies: a collostructional analysis (based on verb types) and a comparison of contexts for constructional minimal pairs.

While some languages appear to have dedicated mirative constructions, others convey mirative meanings through originally “non-mirative categories which acquire mirative meanings in a given context” ( Aikhenvald, 2012 , p. 462). Such mirative extensions of existing constructions have been observed and analyzed at length for evidentials, yet this paper demonstrates that mirative meanings can also be conveyed through certain aspectual constructions, specifically those that select event verbs. A detailed discussion of various aspectual constructions in diverging languages shows that progressive, perfect and perfective aspect markers often prompt mirative interpretations of surprise, novelty or incongruity. I claim that these mirative features are a consequence of the intrinsic association of these aspectual constructions with event verbs and the ‘phenomenal’ situations they refer to, i.e., situations that are susceptible to change. Such phenomenal situations lend themselves more naturally to mirative readings, as their occurrence and development at a certain point in time cannot be fully predicted.

Present-day English turn out is used in several constructions with mirative and evidential overtones. Among these, the raised subject construction and the impersonal construction stand out. The current paper provides a diachronic account of the changes that led to the emergence of these constructions. It examines the semantic and syntactic configuration of turn out and the mechanisms whereby this verb developed evidential and mirative readings during the Late Modern English period. The record shows that turn out developed abruptly from a full lexical (predominantly resultative and change-of-state) control verb into a raising verb in the course of the eighteenth century. This change was triggered by a process of semantic generalization and subjectification whereby the verb acquired evidential and, most notably, mirative nuances. Analogy seems to have played an important role as well, since the evidence suggests that other constructions somewhat similar in form (syntactic structural usage) and meaning facilitated this process. The bulk of the data examined in this study were drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0.

This study is an analysis of the relation between emotion and cognition exhibited by the various uses of meditative-polemic should in English. In its primary uses linked to the expression of emotions, the syntactic construction exhibits a negative evaluative meaning in the superordinate clause, which posits the propositional content of the subordinate clause as counter-expected and therefore endowed with a mirative value. In more intellectual uses in which the superordinate clause does not explicitly express negative meanings, the semantic mirative meaning is preserved, illustrating a case of multistratal modality. In these cases, the initial mirative value is exploited in argumentation as discursive mirativity, counter-expectancy being used as a built-in foundation for more elaborate meanings, allowing a subject to express a particular value while anticipating contradiction on the part of another subject.

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.

This paper analyzes how the semantic category of mirativity is expressed by means of particles in standard Spanish. Specifically, I study the verb-based particle mira ‘look’, and argue for considering it as a mirative particle, which marks the sentence it modifies like new and unexpected information. I describe its properties in both declarative and exclamative sentences and propose a syntactic and semantic analysis. Crucially, the study of this particle permits us to look deeper into the relationship between the semantic category of mirativity and the grammatical and illocutionary category of exclamative. Assuming that mirativity and exclamativity are categories of a different nature that should be differentiated, it is shown that they are expected to coincide in some privileged constructions, where the semantic and formal contributions of the mirative mira and the exclamative construction can be isolated.

A speaker may conceptualise a situation from three different modal ‘perspectives’: epistemic, evidential, and attitudinal. Languages differ in which of these concepts they perspectivise and how a grammaticalised concept may be extended to the other two. ‘Lesser-known’ languages tend to be misrepresented in the typological literature. E.g., the Modern Tibetic languages, including the Ladakhi dialects, are said to have grammaticalised the concept of evidentiality. However, their ‘evidential’ systems differ from the cross-linguistically acknowledged evidential systems, in that speaker attitude is co-grammaticalised and knowledge based on perception shares properties with knowledge based on inferences. DeLancey therefore claimed that these systems also encode mirativity. The starting point for the development of these typologically rather uncommon ‘evidential’ systems was a lexical marker for non-commitment (or admirativity): the auxiliary ḥdug.

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.