Spanish ‘mirative future’

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.