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Albanian admiratives specify a complex of meanings including 'surprise', 'disbelief', and 'report'. "Non-confirmative" summarizes these in contrast to Macedonian's "confirmative". Macedonian synthetic preterites specify speaker confirmation, and Macedonian analytic preterites therefore include -but are not limited to - non-confirmation. Albanian synthetic pasts do not specify confirmativity, and admiratives specify a present (disbelief, report) or previous (surprise) state when the speaker would not confirm the event. The Albanian admirative is used where similar Balkan Slavic and Turkish paradigmatic sets are not. The category "mirative " is unnecessary for the Balkan languages, but "admirative " describes the specific intersection of non-confirmative meanings of Albanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-presents the case, first presented in DeLancey (1997), for the mirative as a crosslinguistic category, and responds to critiques of that work by Gilbert Lazard and Nathan Hill. The nature of the mirative, a category which marks a statement as representing information which is new or unexpected, is exemplified with data from Kham (Tibeto-Burman) and Hare (Athabaskan). The mirative category is shown to be distinct from the well-known mediative or indirective evidential category. Finally, the role of mirativity in the complex verbal systems of Tibetan languages is briefly outline [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues, contra Hill (this volume), that mirativity is an independent linguistic category. It also argues, contra DeLancey (1997), that this category should be defined not only in terms of newsworthiness for the speaker but also in terms of newsworthiness for the addressee, and that expressions of mirativity do not necessarily have an evidential component. These claims are supported by examples of mirative expressions in a number of languages from different genetic stocks. Finally, the article suggests an explanation for the fact that in many languages evidentiality and mirativity are indeed expressed by the same linguistic means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]