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In this paper we will describe the meanings of surprise associated to different uses of the discourse marker mirá in Argentinian Spanish. Our aim is to contrast the subjective stances of surprise emerging in response to the different dialogic frames prompting mirative enunciations with mirá. From the Dialogic Approach to Argumentation and Polyphony, we intend to show how these stances of surprise can be explained as dialogically “caused” by the argumentative representation of: (a) a sudden discovery that brings out something new, (b) a sudden discovery related to something that contradicts a previous belief or assumption and (c) a sudden discovery of something that exceeds its ordinary magnitude or degree.

This article addresses the heretofore unacknowledged similarity of mirative-like and contrastive-focus-like functions by describing data from Denjongke (Tibetic, sip), Bih (Chamic, Vietnam, ibh) and Nepali (Indo-Aryan, nep). The similarity between mirative-like and contrastive-focus-like functions in the aforementioned languages is captured by the notion of something being brought to the forefront of attention. Mirative-like semantics are shown to be epiphenomenal to attention-oriented phenomena, and the functional domain in which the morphemes operate is shown to be attention rather than knowledge structure. The morphemes in the study are described in terms of three parameters, which are put forward as potentially useful tools for describing similar morphemes in other languages: speaker versus addressee orientation, clausal versus phrasal scope, and anaphoric versus cataphoric use. The first two parameters form a fourfold table in which the heuristically named “mirative-like function” has clausal scope and is speaker-oriented (i.e. speaker signals that something has come to the forefront of their attention). “Contrastive-focus-like function”, on the other hand, has phrasal scope and is addressee-oriented (i.e. speaker intends to bring something to the forefront of the addressee’s attention). Cognitively, contrastive-focus-like function is shown to establish joint attention.

Korean has a number of sentence-final particles that mark mirativity at variable degrees. We address the development of one representative form -tani, which has undergone a series of grammaticalization processes, e.g., complementation and insubordination. As it inherited the complementizer function, i.e., introducing a second-hand information, it carried the overtone of surprise, since quotative and reportative are often recruited to present noteworthy information. In Modern Korean, as the marker -tani became a fully established mirative, its function began to depart from its source function of reporting other-authored information, to encompass that of marking self-authored information as well. Since language users exploit grammatical markers for strategic reasons in discourse, the functions of -tani further extended to diverse speech-act marking roles, including feigned surprise, emphasis, news-breaking, challenge, etc. We propose that the emergence of mirative is motivated by three factors, i.e., the source effect, the main-clause ellipsis effect, and the peripheral position effect. Since many sentence-final particles share these characteristics, mirativity marking is not monopolized by a single form, such as -tani, but is shared by a group of markers (the -tani family sentence-final particles), which exhibits diverse epistemic and attitudinal stances that are closely related to the grammatical notion of mirativity.

In this article, we propose an analysis of the so-called echo wh-questionsin situin Italian at syntax–prosody interface. We conduct a prosodic analysis under an experimental approach, showing that a focalized wh-word in echo wh-questions shows its own peculiar properties, different from informative and corrective focus, so that we can analyze it as an instance of Mirative focus. We demonstrate that the wh-word in echo wh-questions occupies a focus position in the low periphery of the clause. We also argue that this position has syntactic properties that, interlaced together with the prosodic properties, lead us to define the projection as a dedicated focus projection for Mirative focus. Crucially, the focus position within the low periphery activated in an echo wh-question, has different syntactic, prosodic and interpretive properties with respect to the informational focus, and to the corrective focus. Therefore, at a general level, our analysis strengthens the idea that partly different intonations and interpretations are associated to positions within the low periphery as opposed to the positions in the left periphery.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the encoding strategies of different types of topics and foci in (the southern variant of) German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS). The discussion will be guided by two main hypotheses: (i) the existence of a strict, universal ordering of topic and focus projections in the tradition of Rizzi (1997) and (ii) the Bodily Mapping Hypothesis (Bross & Hole 2017; Bross 2020), i. e., the hypothesis that scope is expressed in a systematic way in sign languages: the higher an operator is located in the syntactic tree, the higher the articulator expressing it will be. As this study is concerned with very high CP categories, the Bodily Mapping Hypothesis predicts that the categories under discussion will be marked with the highest possible articulators, i.e., the eyebrows. Concerning topics, base-generated frame setters (epistemic, locative, and temporal frames) and moved aboutness topics will be discussed as well as structures resembling pseudo-clefts. Concerning focus, contrastive and mirative focus as well as regular cleft sentences will be examined.

This article explores the diachronic development of mirativeend upin American English, which emerged in the late nineteenth century and which seems to be, at present, in the process of becoming a parenthetical element. The rise of the various mirativeend upconstructions is argued to be the result of both pragmatic enrichment and paradigmatic analogy, motivated by a series of semantically and formally related expressions, most prominently by mirativeturn out. Moreover, the article delves into the process of cooptation to explain the emergence of parenthetical instances in the present-day language. Cooptation is understood as an intrinsically analogical-driven mechanism when it entails the eventual grammaticalization of formulaic parenthetical constructions. Data for the present study were taken from a variety of diachronic and synchronic sources, which include COHA, COCA and NOW, among others.

Mirativeexpressions, which mark surprising information (DeLancey 1997), are often expressed through linguistic forms that are also used to encode other, seemingly unrelated, meanings – e.g. evidential markers that mark lack of direct evidence (Turkish: Slobin & Aksu 1982, Peterson 2010; Cheyenne: Rett & Murray 2013; Cuzco Quechua: Faller 2002; Ostyak: Nikolaeva 1999; among others). In this paper, we show that the English particlelikefeatures a parallel polysemy between a mirative use and its better-knownhedginguse, which expresses weakened commitment to the strict denotation of a linguistic expression. After presenting several diagnostics that point to a genuine empirical difference between the hedging and mirative functions oflike, we propose that both uses widen the size of a contextually restricted set, admitting elements that were previously excluded. More specifically, hedginglikeexpands the set of ‘similar enough’ interpretations that we can apply to a linguistic expression in a context, including interpretations that we would normally consider to be too different from the context at hand. Mirativelike, on the other hand, expands the set of worlds that we are willing to consider as candidates for the actual world in the conversation, resulting in the inclusion of worlds that interlocutors have previously ruled out due to perceived outlandishness. We therefore suggest that the two uses are best treated as sharing a common semantic kernel, deriving hedging and mirativity as effects of the particular type of object to whichlikeapplies.

Typological discussions of mirativity often consider the relationship between mirativity and evidentiality (DeLancey 1997, 2001; Aikhenvald 2004). However, in interaction speakers mobilize pragmatic extensions of miratives in ways that defy specific categorization. This study analyzes the function and distribution of the Navajo enclitic lá in a Navajo Conversational Corpus (Mithun ed 2015 NSF-DEL project 0853598). The enclitic most frequently functions as an interrogative in information questions (Young & Morgan 1987), but it also encodes mirative senses including surprise, counter-expectation, discovery, and reported speech. Though the two seem synchronically unrelated, an examination of the pragmatic functions, as well as consideration of comparative Athabaskan evidence, links the polysemous enclitics as metadiscourse markers signaling contrastive focus on the unexpectedness of a proposition. These data support the interactional relevance of the semantic domain of expectation, subsuming contrastive focus and surprise (Behrens 2012).

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 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 analyzes how the semantic category of mirativity is expressed by means of particles in standard Spanish. Specifically, I study the verb-based particlemira‘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 mirativemiraand the exclamative construction can be isolated.

Present-day Englishturn outis 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 ofturn outand the mechanisms whereby this verb developed evidential and mirative readings during the Late Modern English period. The record shows thatturn outdeveloped 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 theOxford English Dictionaryand theCorpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0.

The notion of mirativity as a grammatical category separate from evidentiality is controversial, but a certain amount of cross-linguistic evidence speaks for its validity. The aim of this study is to investigate this notion in contemporary and earlier Japanese, which is shown to have mirative constructions: (i)nomiratives, (ii)kotomiratives, and (iii) lexical miratives. The particlesnoandkotoare polyfunctional, and they have recently gained a mirative function. Lexical miratives are uttered by the younger generation. These findings raise a diachronic issue regarding the emergence of the three mirative constructions. AdoptingCruschina’s (2011)cartographic approach to discourse-related phenomena and the notion of “emotional vocative” offered byYamada (1936), we argue that what binds the three constructions together is the involvement of the IFocP (Information Focus Phrase) and that their emergences are all explained by grammaticalization paths starting from nominals.

This article focuses on the diachronic development of English turn out and Spanish resultar ‘turn out’ mirative constructions. Having undergone processes of semantic generalization over time, both verbs express evidential and, most prominently, mirative nuances in the present-day languages. This study explores the mechanisms that condition the evolution of turn out and resultar from their original meanings as lexical resultative and change-of-state verbs towards their eventual subjectification and grammaticalization as predicates conveying evidential and mirative senses. The present-day mirative constructions take that- and infinitival complement clauses in both languages. The analysis suggested here shows that both verbs exhibit diverging, though closely related, paths and degrees of grammaticalization. Moreover, this study delves into the further development of these predicates as parenthetical expressions. While English parenthetical turns out has already been grammaticalized, Spanish resulta may be on its way to becoming a grammaticalized parenthetical.

The goal of this paper is to examine what kind of universals and parameters exist in Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), conducting a comparative study between Korean and German. First, we show that complements allowing MCP reveal a structural ambiguity between root or subordinating clauses, which implies that these cases of semi-Roots are only an optional operation in Korean. Second, we discuss the typology of MCP with respect to true Roots and semi-Roots in Korean. Third, we discuss three semantic properties of MCP in Korean: (i) non-presupposition is a prerequisite in triggering MCP, supporting earlier accounts; (ii) the (non-)presuppositional property reflected in complementizer selection precisely patterns with the (non-)factivity of matrix predicates; and (iii) various semantic–pragmatic sources for MCP such as illocutionary forces, expressive/emotional attitude, mirative evidentials, (anti)honorification, and mood choice in Korean are identified. Fourth, we show that Korean complements with MCP and German V2 constructions exhibit striking parallels in terms of distribution, which implies that MCP in these typologically unrelated languages can be captured by a single principle. Finally, we propose a unified account for the syntax of true Roots, semi-Roots, and non-Roots, building on Wurmbrand, 2012 , Wurmbrand, 2014 timing-of-Merge account. This dynamic syntax allows us to capture the crosslinguistic variation such as structural ambiguity of MCP constructions in Korean and the mismatches between syntactic and LF/PF properties in V2 in German. The current analysis has important consequences: First, this study has empirical confirmation that the types of MCP-trigger must be extended to comprise the newly identified cases in Korean. Second, the structural ambiguity for MCP constructions in Korean gives us the generalization that MCP operate on syntax, even though they are semantically or pragmatically motivated. Finally, the comparative analysis of genetically distant languages opens the possibility to provide a principled account of the MCP-activating force heads across languages, incorporating the empirical findings of prior research on individual factors such as emotional attitude, evidentiality, or mood.

The present paper investigates how the Korean sentence-final particle-taniis used to mark mirativity. More interestingly, this paper discusses how Korean speakers or writers employ this mirative marker-tani(i) to often express their negative emotions and satisfy their face needs and (ii) to elicit the reader’s engagement, using data from theSejongContemporary Spoken and Written Corpus. This paper also examines the development of-tani: The non-subjective complementations, in this case involving constructions with the quotative-tani, come to be reinterpreted as subjective constructions with sentence-final-tani, syntactically and pragmatically reanalyzed as a mirative marker. In addition, the findings from this study have broader theoretical and cross-linguistic implications for the existence of mirativity as distinct from evidentiality and the interaction of mirativity with the expression of emotional attitudes (see DeLancey 2001, 2012).

This article is concerned with the distribution of contracted auxiliaries in English, in particular the re- striction against their occurrence in the immediate context of a gap created by movement or ellipsis. We document apparent exceptions to this restriction in varieties of Scots, all occurring in what we call the LOCATIVE DISCOVERY EXPRESSION. We analyse these as mirative constructions, and using new data from the Scots Syntax Atlas we describe patterns of variation in the acceptance of auxiliary contractions in locative discovery expressions which provide clues as to the role of syntax in conditioning auxiliary contraction. Adapting the proposal in Wilder (1997), where contracted auxiliaries are prosodically incorporated into the following predicate, we provide an account in which the differences across dialects with respect to contraction are explained in terms of the availability of different abstract structures.

In Romance, Focus Fronting (FF) is generally related to a contrastive or corrective function. In this paper, I show that Spanish may resort to FF to express a special evaluative meaning, namely, a mirative (conventional) implicature of surprise and unexpectedness. Mirative FF is problematic for the traditional analyses of FF because it is not necessarily contrastive and does not guarantee the traditional articulation of the sentence into a new and a given part. The results of a syntactic experiment on the distribution and interpretation of FF in European Spanish show that speakers accept FF not only in the corrective but also in the mirative context. The acceptability of mirative FF thus proves that FF in Spanish is not exclusively limited to contrast or linked to information-structural requirements such as the new-old information distinction. FF may also be used to express a mirative implicature that requires a set of focal alternatives in order to be interpreted correctly.

This paper describes the attention marker =ɕo in Denjongke, a Tibetic language spoken in Sikkim, India. The presence of the attention marker, which may be either speaker or addressee-oriented, indicates that something is brought to the forefront of the speaker’s or the addressee’s attention. The attention marker =ɕo occurs in declarative uses postposed to a verb, and in interrogative uses postposed to other parts of speech (verbless uses). The attention in verbal uses, which resemble the notion “mirativity”, is either speaker or addressee-oriented, whereas verbless uses, which resemble the notion “contrastive focus”, are always addressee-oriented. When occurring with copulas, the function of =ɕo as either speaker or addressee-oriented is partly dependent on the evidentiality of the copulas. With other verbs, the orientation of =ɕo is dependent on other contextual factors. After describing the verbal and verbless uses of =ɕo, the article concludes by showing why the categories focus and mirativity are problematic for describing =ɕo. Existing definitions of mirativity by DeLancey (1997), Peterson (2013), Dickinson (2000), Hyslop (2011b), Hengeveld & Olbertz (2012) and Aikhenvald (2012) are shown to fail to accommodate the range of uses of =ɕo. The concept of attention, on the other hand, not only describes the Denjongke data more comprehensively but also helps understand the interface between mirative-like and focus-like phenomena. The last section illustrates the similarity of =ɕo to exclusively addressee-oriented morphemes in Nepali, Japanese (Davis 2011) and Ingush (Nichols 2011), suggesting that the concept of attention may prove useful for describing exclusively addressee-oriented phenomena, which have rarely been associated with “mirativity”.

International audience; This paper deals with asymmetric complex predicates (combining a main verb and a 'light' verb) in Odia, an Indo-Aryan language. The main focus is on the two most common light verbs-jaa 'go' and-de 'give'. We argue that these light verbs are constructions in their own right affecting the interpretation of the event in two ways: (i) they necessarily refer to the completion of the event (as opposed to the single verb construction) and (ii) they typically express unexpectedness or abruptness and can as such be considered a mirative construction as defined by Delancey (2012). Transitivity plays a major role not only in the distinction between-jaa 'go' and-de 'give' but also in differences of degree of completion and unexpectedness.

This paper presents a possible mirative reading of the constructions with the near deictic copula and its cognates in a group of Neo-Aramaic dialects from north-eastern Iraq. It is here argued that providing a diachronic perspective on the markers of mirativity supports the stand which regards mirativity as separate from evidentiality. However, even when mirativity is considered a modal category on the morphosyntactic and semantic level, on the level of communication, it shares similar functions with evidentiality, especially when perfect and deictic/presentative markers are concerned. The analysis results in expanding the existing framework of mirativity to include, next to its well-recognised sources such as the resultative, also the deictic and presentative forms.

Quotative and reportative are grammatical devices of presenting information from a source other than the speaker himself. The Korean predicative reportative - tanta developed from a quotative construction and is currently used for self-quoting for rhetorical effect. The development of reportative from quotative was enabled by the loss of the verbum dicendi, ha- ‘say,’ which resulted in ambiguity of the speaker, i.e., the original source of the information. The opacity of the utterer further led to the extension of the usage to seemingly inappropriate contexts, i.e., when the report is about the speaker himself or herself, thus, technically, the speaker is reporting about himself or herself as if the information were from a third source. This type of change is motivated by the strategic use of reportative constructions for rhetorical effect, i.e., presenting subjective states of the speaker himself or herself, especially with emotional stances, as if they had objective validity. Furthermore, the rhetorical effect of this ‘self-reporting’ is the nuance of mirativity. The mirative function brings forth a strong engaging effect on the part of the addressee because it signals the speaker's invitation of the addressee into an epistemic or emotional common ground.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how evidentials are used to reflect the unprepared mind of the speaker. Lexical evidentials are typically used by speakers to encode the kinds of evidence they have for making statements about states, events and actions they did not personally witness or were a part of. However, under certain conditions evidentials can be used to express the surprise of the speaker. This is known in the literature under the label mirativity. The empirical factors that condition the mirative use of an evidential are first determined, and then using an information and schema-theoretic analysis it is shown that mirativity is the linguistic reflex of a series of mental events involving the processing of new information, coupled with other contextual factors involving speaker knowledge.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the linguistic, psychological and cognitive properties of utterances that express the surprise of the speaker, with a focus on how grammatical evidentials are used for this purpose. This is often labeled in the linguistics literature as mirativity. While there has been a flurry of recent interest in mirativity, we still lack an understanding of how and why evidentials are used this way, and an explanation of this effect. In this paper I take steps to filling this gap by showing how the mirativity associated with grammatical evidentials is one of the many linguistic reflexes of the more general cognitive process of surprise. I approach this by analyzing mirativity, and the language of surprise more generally, in a schema-theoretic framework enriched with the notion of new environmental information. I elaborate on the field methodological issues involved with testing the mirative use of an evidential and why they are used this way by connecting mirative evidentials to the broader phenomenon of deixis.

This paper studies the Cantonese sentence final particle tim1 and more generally the semantics of additive particles. The range of meanings conveyed by tim1 appears quite broad, covering both scalar and non-scalar additive readings as well as mirative ones. We argue in favor of separating an additive tim1-particle and a mirative one. Our claims are based on their semantic differences but also on syntactic and acoustic differences. We formalize the meaning of each of these particles using a probabilistic argumentative framework which helps us define the scale with which tim1 associates, namely an argumentative scale which is relative to speaker’s goal in the discourse. In doing so we also contrast the meaning of each particle with similar elements in other languages. We use these descriptions to claim that the mirative reading is the result of a metonymic semantic shift of the additive reading of the particle, and discuss paths of semantic change for additive particles in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective.

In this work I explore the different discourse–syntax interface properties of focus fronting in Standard Spanish (SS) and Southern Peninsular Spanish (SPS) including Andalusian and Extremaduran varieties. In SS it is taken for granted that in focus fronting the verb is obligatorily adjacent to the preposed constituent. I show that this is not the case in SPS, where this condition is optional. I carry out an analysis of three types of foci which involve movement to the left periphery (contrastive focus, mirative focus and quantifier fronting) and one type of topic (resumptive preposing). Discourse, syntactic, and semantic properties are taken into account to illustrate this typology. Crucially, only contrastive and mirative focus contexts allow for preverbal subjects in SPS, which are proposed to be Given Topics in this variety. On the other hand, resumptive preposing is shown to entail a case of topic fronting. I use different experiments with empirical data and judgements by native speakers to test my proposal that focus-verb (or topic-verb) adjacency is subject to microparametric variation in Spanish.

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.

Spanish future and conditional morphemes may display inferential readings: Elena ganaria la carrera ayer, as in ‘Helen must have won the race yesterday’, a present deduction about a past event. They may also display readings known as concessive, dubbed ‘mirative’ here: Elena ganaria la carrera ayer, pero no esta contenta ‘Helen might have won the race yesterday, but she is not satisfied’. The proposal is that such futures and conditional affixes encode an evidential modal involving a body of indirect information, which the speaker may vouch for or not. This modal contributes to propositional content and can be syntactically and semantically embedded, so is not an illocutionary marker. It is a degree expression that does not reduce to necessity or possibility, so is reminiscent of gradable adjectives such as tall or probable. It displays the flexible anchoring characteristics of predicates of personal taste such as tasty, so may partially differ from canonical epistemic modals. Ordering sources and anchoring behavior combine in such a modal to trigger various levels of confidence in the information, resulting in variability in force, which may range from certainty/necessity to doubt/possibility in both inferentials and miratives.

Mirativity is a distinct grammatical category. In the literature, no mirative marker has been identified so far in Mandarin Chinese. This paper aims to argue that Mandarin Chinese is a language that has grammatical means of expressing mirativity. The sentence-final particle le (SF le) in Mandarin is a mirative marker in its own right. It encodes the information as newsworthy or surprising and occurs with different time references and Illocutions. Based on the data from SF le, this paper extends the definition of mirativity given by Hengeveld & Olbertz (2012) by proposing that mirativity can not only be targeted towards either the speaker or the addressee, but also towards both. Lastly, it is argued that mirativity should be accounted for at the layer of Communicated Content at the Interpersonal Level in Functional Discourse Grammar.

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 outlined.

This article takes up a relatively understudied phenomenon in English wherein the additive scalar focus particle even occurs following its focus, typically in utterance-final (UF) position. We show that this UF incarnation of even is not a simple variant of its prefocal (PF) counterpart. Four distinct functions of UF-EVEN are identified: (1) the mirative, (2) the elaborative, (3) the simple additive, and (4) the simple corrective. Building on Traugott’s theory of semantic change, the authors present an analysis that outlines the developmental path of UF-EVEN: all its functions are claimed to originate from PF-EVEN’s meaning, although some are less directly related to it. In addition, the authors demonstrate that UF-EVEN shares some of its developmental paths with discourse markers like actually and in fact, suggesting that it has taken on the function of a sentential adverb. The article ends with discussing repercussions for the theory of meaning change and its conventionalization.

This paper examines extensions in present perfect (PP) usage in a corpus of police media reports published on the web in Australia, following previous work on extensions in the uses of the PP in oral narratives ( Engel and Ritz, 2000 , Ritz, 2007 , Ritz and Engel, 2008 ). The following were examined: proportion of tenses in the corpus, lexical aspect of VPs, co-occurrences of the PP with temporal adverbials, and discourse characteristics. The latter were the main focus of the paper, and patterns in PP usage in relation to rhetorical and information structures were examined in detail. The results show that PP clauses are almost as frequent as simple past clauses; that the PP appears frequently in sequences expressing temporal progression, and that it is often combined with a range of adverbials, including past dates and times. It is also argued that police usage of the PP can be seen to give rise to mirative effects, with consequences at the level of discourse usage. In particular, the PP is favoured for introduction of new/unexpected discourse information, while the SP is used in-between clauses in the PP to continue a sub-segment. I use and extend Caudal and Roussarie's (2006) viewpoint analysis of perfects that have acquired perfective past meanings as well as Vikner's (1985) three two-place relations system for the representation of tenses, and propose that the non-standard PP in Australian English can be represented as having a result stage filling a temporal interval between a past reference time and a present one, the extended-now. I suggest that such an interval is exploited to give rise to various meanings and discourse effects.

In this article, we investigate the functional itinerary followed by Hebrew be'emet (`really, actually, indeed', lit. `in truth'), through a close exploration of its synchronic uses in the contemporary spoken language. Since this utterance, derived from the noun 'emet (`truth'), is so profoundly tied in with the speaker's beliefs and attitudes towards his or her discourse, we consider issues of metalanguage, modality, evidentiality, and stance. Be'emet is traditionally classified as `adverb', but in our corpus of naturally occurring Hebrew conversation, only 22 percent of all tokens function in this role. Whereas these tokens function referentially, the great majority of tokens (70%) function in the interpersonal realm of discourse, manifesting properties of discourse markers: 44.5 percent of all tokens function as full-fledged discourse markers (both semantically and structurally, Maschler, 1998) serving mirative (DeLancey, 2001), reprimanding, or negating any doubt roles; 22.5 percent function to ratify a previous stance; and three percent function to latch onto a new topic, requesting its elaboration. An intermediate category (8%) is composed of tokens functioning both referentially and interpersonally, mid-way between an adverb and a discourse marker, in a way that is particularly illuminating for understanding the changes undergone by be'emet as a result of its employment in discourse. The study thus lends support to previous studies of subjectification and intersubjectification in the process of grammaticization of discourse markers (Traugott, 2003; Traugott and Dasher, 2002).

This article proposes that the sentence enders –kwun, –ney, and –tela form a natural class of evidential (more specifically, mirative) markers in Korean. All three signal that an immediate consciousness shift has taken place within the speaker. The shift is touched off by an external sensory and/or inferential trigger within the realm of the speaker’s direct experience which effects an instantaneous cognitive realization. In the case of –kwun and –ney, the trigger and its consequent consciousness shift occur at the moment of speech; in the case of –tela, the consciousness shift and realization occurred in the past and emerges in the re-telling of past-time narratives. The literature treats –kwun and –ney as epistemic modals, and –tela (albeit marginally) as a hearsay evidential, but not a mirative. Moreover, traditional accounts of Korean grammar overwhelmingly blend evidentiality and epistemic modality into a single notion. It is argued here that, particularly in the case of Korean, epistemic modality and evidentiality represent two very different phenomena and should be treated as such since their functions of reflecting the speaker’s belief states and knowledge states are markedly different. The target particles –kwun, –ney, and –tela, classified as mirative markers, provide preliminary evidence in support of this claim.

This paper discusses the conditions for the grammaticalization of evidentiality in different languages, with special attention to the languages of South Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In these languages, evidentially marked discourse is opposed to neutral discourse, while in some other languages, evidential markers are necessarily included in every verb form; and in others, evidentiality is only lexically expressed. The last section deals with the problem of cross-language comparisons of evidential systems. A few thoughts are presented on the question of how to build a set of concepts to be used as a tertium comparationis.

Evidentiality refers to the grammatical marking of the source of evidence for a proposition; mirativity refers to the marking of a proposition as representing information which is new to the speaker. Mirativity has sometimes been thought of as part of the larger category of evidentiality. Based on evidence from Tibetan, Hare, and other languages, it is argued here that mirativity must be recognized as a distinct semantic and grammatical category. The existence in many languages of a form which combines mirative and inferential readings can be explained in terms of the interaction of mirativity and aspect: The combination of mirative marking and perfective aspect will naturally tend to be interpreted as inferential, since an event in the past will ordinarily be new information to the speaker only if his or her knowledge of it derives from secondary evidence rather than from direct perception.

The paper discusses the cross-linguistic classification of evidential values (including the so-called admirative value) and proposes a typology of evidential systems based on the distinction between ‘direct’, ‘reflected’, and ‘mediated’ evidence.

Desde la lingüística histórica, la tipológica y la de contacto, se han destacado las relaciones existentes entre las categorías de perfecto, evidencial y admirativo. En el presente trabajo, proponemos que estas relaciones se fundan en una base semánticopragmática común a las tres, compartida también con la de antiperfecto. En todas ellas, junto con explicitar una eventualidad se introduce en el discurso otra, estrechamente vinculada al hablante. Este valor común está a la base de la subjetividad y el componente epistémico que típicamente presentan las categorías en estudio. La propuesta se ilustra con casos del español, el mapudungun, el español en contacto con lenguas indígenas y otras lenguas no relacionadas. Perfect, antiperfect, evidential and mirative: Saying one event to communicate two. Historical, typological, and contact linguistics have recognized the relationships among the categories of perfect, evidential and mirative. In this work, we propose that such relationships stem from a semantic-pragmatic ground common to those categories and the category of antiperfect. All of them designate one eventuality explicitly, but also introduce another speaker-related eventuality implicitly in the ongoing discourse. This basic meaning grounds the subjective and epistemic meanings tipically associated with the categories. Our proposal is illustrated with examples form Spanish, Mapudungun, Spanish in contact with American languages, and other languages. Fil: Soto, Guillermo Daniel. Universidad de Chile; Chile. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina Fil: Hasler Sandoval, Felipe Daniel. Universidad de Chile; Chile. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina

The range of mirative meanings across the world's languages subsumes sudden discovery, surprise, and unpreparedmind of the speaker (and also the audience or the main character of a story). Mirative markers may also convey overtones of counterexpectation and new information. The range of mirative meanings may be expressed through a verbal affix, a complex predicate, or a pronoun. Evidentials whose major function is to express information source may have mirative extensions, especially in the context of the 1st person subject. The mirative category appears to be susceptible to linguistic diffusion.

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mirative” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of h.\ud dug in “Lhasa” Tibetan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described ḥdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard’s “mediative” (1999) or Johanson’s “indirective” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established\ud evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis.

Notions of evidentiality and mirativity are related; however there are aspects of each of them which indicate that mirativity is a distinct conceptual category. One issue is how languages encode these categories. The semantic domain of evidentiality refers to the source of knowledge behind assertions. In Brazilian Portuguese, for example, there is no specific category for evidentiality or mirativity, but there is a syntactic construction in one dialect of Brazilian Portuguese that exhibits mirative overtones. The main goal of this paper is to describe that construction, based on a functional semantic approach. Notions of evidentiality and mirativity are related; however there are aspects of each of them which indicate that mirativity is a distinct conceptual category. One issue is how languages encode these categories. The semantic domain of evidentiality refers to the source of knowledge behind assertions. In Brazilian Portuguese, for example, there is no specific category for evidentiality or mirativity, but there is a syntactic construction in one dialect of Brazilian Portuguese that exhibits mirative overtones. The main goal of this paper is to describe that construction, based on a functional semantic approach.

Exclamative clauses exhibit a structural diversity which raises the question of whether they form a clause type in the sense of Sadock & Zwicky (1985). Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we argue that the class of exclamatives is syntactically characterizable in terms of a pair of abstract syntactic properties. Moreover, we propose that these properties encode two components of meaning which uniquely define the semantics and pragmatics of exclarnatives. Overall, our paper is a contribution to the study of the syntaxlsemantics interface and offers a new perspective on the notion of clause type., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, Bd. 24 (2001): Sentence type and specificity

Etat de la recherche dans le domaine des morphemes grammaticaux marqueurs de la modalite epistemique de " l'evidence " (indicateur de la source de l'information dans la proposition)