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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.

In this paper, we discuss the morphosyntactic properties and the functional contribution of the discourse-structuring element mat in Lithuanian, which was largely overlooked in previous research. We demonstrate that in each function mat is associated with peculiar morphosyntactic behaviour. We argue that it is the construction in which it occurs as a whole that bears meaning, rather than mat as a lexical unit on its own. In our analysis, we invoke insights and some apparatus of Construction Grammar approaches, which fit well with our observations in their focus on non-compositional aspects of linguistic structure.

O objetivo principal deste artigo é propor uma descrição inicial, com base nos estudos gerativistas, de um tipo de oração infinitiva do português brasileiro introduzida pelo conectivo para (Ana foi até o banco só para descobrir que esqueceu o cartão), que denominamos de oração mirativa (cf. JĘDRZEJOWSKI, 2018). Essas orações se assemelham às orações adverbiais finais infinitivas em sua forma, mas, diferentemente das finais, não expressam um sentido de finalidade, denotando sobretudo um desfecho contrário às expectativas. Mostramos que, além da diferença de sentido, as mirativas também se distinguem das finais no que se refere ao controle do sujeito do infinitivo e à sensibilidade a certas operações sintáticas, como deslocamento da oração. Mostramos ainda que, quando mirativas e finais coocorrem em uma sentença, a ordem entre elas deve ser finais-mirativas, o que indica que as mirativas estariam adjungidas a uma posição mais alta na estrutura.

The article investigates the semantic identity and intertextual correlation of adjectives used by F. A. Abramov in his story «Wooden horses». The study focuses on the conceptual significance of adjectives in a literary text. The aim of the research was to discover the role of quality-denoting lexemes (qualitative concepts) in the formation of artistic images and expression of the author’s intention on the basis of a linguistic analysis of adjectives. The most active lexico-semantic groups of adjectives are described: time, human character, material, appearance of objects, human physical appearance, colour and light, intellectual assessment, mirative assessment; and proves the role of adjectives in the conceptualization of literaty images. On the basis of quantitative and semantic analysis and also taking into the account the syntagmatic features of adjectives, the important conceptual semantic fields – «Time» and «Man» – are defined. A detailed analysis of the semantics of adjectives helps to ascertain the correlation of conceptually relevant meanings in the text, as well as to bring the reader’s interpretation closer to understanding the author’s intention.

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.

International audience; This paper explores the semantic motivation of postmodal auxiliaries in complement constructions conveying mirativity in French and Finnish. French pouvoir ‘can’ and Finnish pitää ‘should’ both occur as postmodal markers in complements of epistemic and axiological items. These constructions refer to events that deviate from what is discursively projected as expected. As a modal verb of possibility, pouvoir profiles the meaning ‘p and not ¬p’, which is based on an opposition, while pitää, originally a necessity verb, gives prominence to the paradigmatic meaning ’p instead of q1, q2 …’. While the two verbs function in a similar manner as indexes of an interclausal semantic link in mirative constructions, the meaning of unexpectedness is not construed in the same way, and the critical contexts in the evolution of postmodal complement patterns with pouvoir and pitää are of a different type.

This chapter provides an account of the Spanish ‘mirative future.’ Starting from the assumption that the Spanish future is an inferential evidential (Escandell-Vidal 2010, 2014, 2020), it is argued that mirativity is contextually inferred as a result of a combination of multiple factors that constrain interpretation. These factors include restrictions on word order (only VS), intonational patterns (either fall-rise or high rise), and kind of predicates (individual-level, gradable, negative predicates). In addition, the speaker encodes that s/he has only indirect evidence, but the context of utterance makes it clear that this is not so. Given these conditions, mirative uses are essentially rhetorical questions. From this perspective, the Spanish mirative future reproduces a consistent pattern across languages: mirative interpretations are obtained when indirect or inferential evidential markers are used in contexts where the speaker has direct experience of the facts.

This chapter investigates the interpretation of tense in Japanese mirative sentences using nante/towa and considers cross-linguistic variations of mirativity in terms of tense. In Japanese, when nante or towa is combined with a proposition that contains the so-called non-past form ru, the sentence becomes ambiguous as having both a non-past (future/present) reading and a past reading. Based on a theory by Sawada and Sawada (2019), we argue that this ambiguity of tense is due to the conventional implicature of nante/towa: nante/towa can take a ‘non-tensed’ proposition p and conventionally implies that (i) p is settled (i.e., p is/was true or predicted to be true) and (ii) the speaker did not expect such p. It will be shown that a basic analysis of nante/towa can apply to the English exclamatory that-clause, which also presents an ambiguity of tense, and at least partially to the Korean mirative tani sentence in which a past-oriented meaning can be represented based on the stem form of a verb.

The interrogative element cómo ‘how’ of Spanish has a double meaning: that of manner and that causal. With the former, it behaves like a typical interrogative element, but, with the latter, its behavior manifests the specificities of por qué ‘why’. Two analyses are proposed, always in cartographic terms: one for sentences with cómo with a causal value and another one for sentences in which cómo with this value appears in front of es que ‘is that’ (cómo es que). Indeed, the conditions for embedding for these two types are different (much more restricted for the first one than for the second one). It is proposed that sentences with cómo without es que have an exclamative illocutionary force with an interrogative component, while the force of sentences with cómo es que would be a variant of the interrogative one (interro-exclamative force). In both cases, their factual and mirative nature is syntactically relevant. The general analysis proposal is finally applied to a poorly studied element, que cosa que (Ripacurtian Catalan and Aragonese).

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.

International audience; This paper explores expressive questions in English and French. It is usage-based and draws upon a sample of naturally-occurring data. It focuses on what the hell questions in English and mais qu'est-ce que questions in French. A distinction is made between two types of expressivity, labelled emotional expressivity and iconic expressivity. They both convey intensification and may operate at the lexical, discursive, semantic and syntactic levels. In what the hell questions, the left periphery is a core area for activating expressivity. In mais qu'est-ce que questions, expressivity markers are varied and not restricted to the left periphery. Iconic expressivity is claimed to be unrelated to the speaker's emotional attitude and triggered by enactment markers.

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 paper investigates the ambiguity of tense in the Japanese mirative sentence with nante/towa. Unlike an English sentence exclamative (e.g., (Wow), John won the race!), a Japanese sentence with nante/towa has a property of ambiguity with regard to tense. When nante or towa is combined with a proposition that contains the so-called non-past form ru, the sentence can be ambiguous between a non-past (future/present) reading and a past reading. This fact is surprising because the non-past form ru can never be used for describing a past event. We argue that the ambiguous interpretation of nante/towa comes from the conventional implicature of nante/towa. Unlike an English sentence exclamation (Rett 2011), the Japanese nante/towa takes a “tenseless” proposition p (i.e., ru does not specify a tense) and conventionally implies that (i) p is settled (i.e., p is/was true or predicted to be true) and (ii) the speaker had not expected that p. We will also consider the case where p + nante/towa is embedded under a surprising predicate and claim that both the embedded and non-embedded nante/towa can be analyzed in a uniform way, suggesting that the embedded nante/towa clause is an instance of a main clause phenomenon (rather than a relative tense phenomenon).

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).