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Mirativity
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Mirativity
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In linguistics, mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality,[1][2] that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind.[1][3] Grammatical elements that encode the semantic category of mirativity are called miratives (abbreviated MIR).[4][5]

History of the concept

[edit]

Albanian has a series of verb forms called miratives or admiratives. These may express surprise on the part of the speaker, but may also have other functions, such as expressing irony, doubt, or reportedness.[6] The Albanian use of admirative forms is unique in the Balkan context. It is not translatable into other languages. The expression of neutral reportedness can be rendered by 'apparently'.[7]

While acknowledging the Balkanist term admiratives, DeLancey (1997) promoted miratives as a cross-linguistic term, which he adapted from Jacobsen's (1964) description of the Washo language.[8][9] According to DeLancey (1997), Turkish, Hare, Sunwar, Lhasa Tibetan, and Korean exhibit a grammatical category to mark information that is new to the speaker.[4]

In Turkish, the verbal suffix -miş appears in the same slot as the past tense -di. [10][11]

Kemal

gel-di

Kemal gel-di

'Kemal came.'

Kemal

gel-miş

Kemal gel-miş

'Kemal came!?'

While it is reasonable to assume that -miş marks indirect evidentiality[12] as long as 'inference' and 'hearsay' interpretations[13] are concerned, this does not explain the 'surprise' use of the suffix in the following sentence: [13][14]

Kız-ınız

daughter-your

çok

very

iyi

good

piyano

piano

çal-ıyor-muş.

play-PRES-MIR

Kız-ınız çok iyi piyano çal-ıyor-muş.

daughter-your very good piano play-PRES-MIR

'Your daughter plays the piano very well!'

Citing DeLancey as a predecessor, many researchers have reported miratives in the Tibeto-Burman family and other languages.[15][16]

Criticisms

[edit]

Mirativity is not necessarily expressed through a category on its own; Aikhenvald (2004) points out that a mirative meaning may also be coded by using other grammatical devices such as an evidential[17] or tense[18] marker. This led some researchers to question the status of mirativity as a grammatical category. Lazard (1999) suggested that evidentials and miratives would be subsumed under the term mediative.[19] Hill argued that the evidence given by DeLancey and by Aikhenvald (2004) was either wrong or insufficient. [20]

In Lhasa Tibetan, the direct evidential verb 'dug may express mirativity in contrast to the other existential verbs, especially when it is used in a statement on the speaker themselves:[21][22]

nga-r

1-LOC

deb

book

de

that

yod.

exist

nga-r deb de yod.

1-LOC book that exist

'I have that book'

nga-r

1-LOC

deb

book

de

that

'dug.

exist

nga-r deb de 'dug.

1-LOC book that exist

'I have that book [which I should have returned].'

However, the mirative account does not hold for the following sentence, where 'dug is used as an auxiliary verb and has nothing to do with surprise, sudden discovery nor unexpectedness:[23][24]

nga

1

na-gi-'dug.

sick-PRES-AUX

nga na-gi-'dug.

1 sick-PRES-AUX

'I'm sick at the moment.'

While DeLancey (2012) made no mention of Turkish, Sunwar or Korean, he still promoted Hare, Kham, and Magar as clear cases of miratives. Hill (2015) in response provided an alternative analysis of Hare, re-analyzing DeLancey's evidence for 'mirativity' as direct evidentiality.[25]

Responses to criticisms

[edit]

Hengeveld and Olbertz (2012) argue against Hill (2012) for miratives as a distinct category, citing data from Tarma Quechua, Ecuadorian Highland Spanish, Xamamauteri (a Yanomaman language), Kham, and Cupeño.[26] DeLancey (2012) also argued strenuously against Hill's (2012) claims.[27][20] Zeisler (2018), focusing on the Tibetic languages, considers both Hill and DeLancey to be partly wrong and partly right, and argues that the relevant categories in Tibetic languages represent grammatical marking of "speaker attitude" rather than of evidentiality.[28]

Semantics

[edit]

Unlike evidentials, miratives may mark novelty of information to anyone involved in the conversation rather than the speaker’s source of information,[29] although what is labelled as 'miratives' varies in meaning. Aikhenvald (2012) analyses variations of mirative meanings as follows:[30]

  1. Sudden discovery, sudden revelation or realization by the speaker, by the audience (or addressee), or by the main character;
  2. Surprise of the speaker, of the audience (or addressee), or of the main character;
  3. Unprepared mind of the speaker, of the audience (or addressee), or of the main character;
  4. Counter-expectation to the speaker, to the addressee, or to the main character;
  5. Information new to the speaker, to the addressee, or to the main character.

Apparently, a mirative marker does not always cover all of those values. For example, !Xun, a Northern Khoisan language has a mirative particle kohà, which can follow an evidential marker but is in complementary distribution with the counter-expectation marker kò.[29] This suggests that mirativity forms a different grammatical category from evidentiality while surprise and counter-expectation are expressed by different particles in the language.

Coding of mirativity

[edit]

Many languages can express surprise or new information using an interjection like 'Wow!'.[31] In English, the expression of surprise can be rendered by 'oh, look!' or 'lookee there!'. Intonation can also contribute to expression of mirative meanings.[32]

Some languages have a sentence-final particle (SFP) for mirativity. In Cantonese, the SFP wo3 expresses noteworthiness while wo4 is associated with unexpectedness, both of which fit the definition of miratives in contrast with the hearsay evidential wo5.[33]

Mirativity can be expressed through verbal morphology, as is the case with the "sudden discovery tense" marker -naq in Tarma Quechua:[34][35]

chawra-qa

then-TOP

cha:-qa

that-TOP

ka-ku-naq

be-CUST-3.A/S.MIR

alqu

dog

chawra-qa cha:-qa ka-ku-naq alqu

then-TOP that-TOP be-CUST-3.A/S.MIR dog

‘So it turned out that he was a dog [not a human being as he had appeared to be].’

References

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Further reading

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Mirativity

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Mirativity is a in that encodes a speaker's surprise, counterexpectation, or realization that the in an is new or unexpected to them. This category highlights the speaker's epistemic stance toward the , often marking it as freshly acquired rather than presupposed or anticipated content. The term "mirativity" was coined by linguist Scott DeLancey in 1997 to describe this cross-linguistically attested phenomenon, drawing from observations in languages like Tibetan and where specific markers convey this sense of novelty without directly indicating the source of evidence. Although mirativity is conceptually and grammatically distinct from —which grammatically specifies the source of information, such as direct observation or —the two categories frequently overlap, particularly in systems where mirative markers develop from evidential forms through diachronic reanalysis. For instance, in , the egophoric evidential can combine with to yield a mirative reading, implying recent discovery of a past event via indirect evidence. This affinity arises because both involve the speaker's knowledge state, but mirativity focuses on the attitudinal update of surprise rather than evidential sourcing. Some scholars, however, question whether mirativity constitutes a valid independent category, arguing it may be a pragmatic effect of . Nonetheless, it is supported by typological evidence from approximately 60 languages, including Indo-European, Turkic, and Bantu families, where it is expressed through dedicated morphology, auxiliaries, or prosody. Mirative marking varies widely across languages and can appear in verbal inflections, particles, light verbs, or even intonational contours. In Turkish, the suffix -miş on verbs like gel-miş ('he has come') conveys both inferential and mirative surprise at an unexpected arrival. In English, which lacks dedicated morphological miratives, surprise is often prosodically encoded through high pitch accents (L + H*) and exclamative structures, as in "Wow, Keisha won!" where the intonation signals exceeded expectations. Other examples include the Shanghai Wu particle yikaon, which targets sets of propositions to express counterexpectation in contexts like sudden realizations. These forms are typically not-at-issue content, scoping over the entire utterance to convey the speaker's overall epistemic shock. Debates persist regarding the precise semantics of mirativity, with some analyses emphasizing its roots in cognitive surprise mechanisms—such as novelty detection and expectation violation—while others explore its gradations, from mild unexpectedness to strong disbelief. Cross-linguistic studies reveal that mirativity is not universal in dedicated form but emerges universally through pragmatic means, underscoring its role in information structure and speaker-hearer dynamics. Ongoing research integrates formal semantics, typology, and to refine its theoretical status, confirming mirativity as a key lens for understanding how languages package epistemic attitudes.

Overview

Definition

Mirativity is a in that encodes a speaker's attitude toward a as representing new, unexpected, or surprising , distinct from the source of for that . This marking highlights the proposition's novelty relative to the speaker's prior knowledge state, often involving counterexpectation where the content contradicts the speaker's expectations. Although occasionally associated with , mirativity focuses on the psychological impact of the information rather than its evidential basis. The concept was first proposed by linguist Scott DeLancey in 1997, drawing from his analysis of the ḥdug in , which he described as a marker of unanticipated events entering the speaker's awareness. DeLancey characterized mirativity as non-epistemic in nature, emphasizing its role in signaling the mental disruption caused by surprising information, while still asserting the . Core features include the expression of sudden realization or unpreparedness for the event, positioning mirativity as a category of speaker-oriented surprise. Mirative markers across languages typically manifest as verbal inflections, , or particles that modify forms to convey this of surprise. These elements integrate with the clause to indicate that the proposition's content is freshly acquired or counter to anticipated outcomes, thereby altering the interpretive frame of the utterance.

Distinction from Evidentiality and Other Categories

Mirativity encodes the speaker's epistemic surprise or counterexpectation toward a , marking it as newly acquired or unexpected regardless of its evidential source. In contrast, grammaticalizes the source or mode of access to that , such as direct sensory , , or , without inherently conveying the speaker's attitudinal reaction to its novelty. This distinction underscores that mirative marking targets the psychological impact on the speaker's knowledge state, while evidential marking focuses on justificatory grounds for the assertion. Although mirativity and are semantically independent categories, overlaps occur in languages where evidential forms extend to mirative functions, often through diachronic reanalysis. For instance, in Turkish, the inferential evidential -mIş can convey surprise about directly witnessed events, deriving its mirative reading from the speaker's recent acquisition of rather than evidential restrictions alone. Similarly, in Bulgarian, admirative forms based on evidentials assert the with an added layer of unexpectedness, but retain evidential source specification only in certain contexts. These cases illustrate how evidential markers may implicate mirativity via conversational principles, yet the core semantics remain separable: miratives assert with surprise, whereas evidentials often contribute non-assertive, not-at-issue content. Mirativity must also be differentiated from exclamatives, which express the speaker's emotional evaluation or intensity toward a degree or without requiring a component of epistemic novelty or shift. Exclamatives typically realize a dedicated illocutionary force as a sentence type, presupposing their content and focusing on subjective affect, whereas mirativity functions as a modal operator within declarative, , or other structures, asserting or questioning the while highlighting its counterexpectational status. It further contrasts with counterfactuality, a category that grammaticalizes hypothetical or unrealized scenarios diverging from actuality, without implicating the speaker's surprise upon discovering real-world facts. A key criterion for identifying mirativity involves testing its felicity in contexts of expectation violation: mirative markers are appropriate when the proposition represents a sudden update to the speaker's prior beliefs, inducing a cognitive shift from or misalignment to , but infelicitous when the information aligns with expectations. This knowledge-structure alteration distinguishes mirativity from mere evidential reporting or exclamative outburst, as it requires the proposition's integration as new, asserted knowledge.

Historical Development

Origin and Introduction

The concept of mirativity originated in through the work of Scott DeLancey, who introduced it as a distinct for marking information that is unexpected or newly realized by the speaker. In his seminal 1997 paper, DeLancey argued that certain morphological markers across languages encode the speaker's surprise or lack of prior preparation for the proposition, separate from or other modal categories. This foundational contribution highlighted mirativity's role in reflecting the epistemic status of knowledge within the speaker's cognitive framework. DeLancey's motivation stemmed from his observations of grammatical patterns in , particularly the "immediate realization" or egophoric markers in , which, according to DeLancey, signal sudden awareness of events or states previously unknown to the speaker. For instance, in , the auxiliary ḥdug conveys a mirative sense when used with non-firsthand or newly discovered information, emphasizing the proposition's novelty rather than its source—though this interpretation has been subject to debate. These patterns, also noted in related languages like Sunwar and Newari, demonstrated a consistent functional domain for encoding counterexpectation or unpreparedness. To describe this category, DeLancey coined the term "mirativity," derived from the Latin verb mīror meaning "to wonder at" or "to be surprised by," aiming for a neutral label focused on cognitive surprise. He deliberately distinguished it from "admirativity," a term previously used for similar phenomena in Balkan languages like Albanian and Aromanian, where it often carried connotations of or irony rather than pure unexpectedness. This choice underscored mirativity's broader applicability beyond regional evidential systems. Initial reception of the concept was limited in the late , with sporadic references in typological discussions but no widespread adoption until the early 2000s. The first major textbook acknowledgment appeared in Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald's comprehensive study on , which devoted a dedicated chapter to mirative extensions of evidential markers while affirming its independence as a category. This helped integrate mirativity into broader grammatical theory.

Key Publications and Milestones

In the early 2000s, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald's chapter on in the edited volume Studies in Evidentiality (2003) introduced mirativity to a broader linguistic audience, highlighting its role in Amazonian languages where it often overlaps with but remains distinct from evidential marking. This work built on Scott DeLancey's foundational proposal by emphasizing typological parallels across language families. A significant expansion of the category's scope came in 1999 with Gilbert Lazard's article "Mirativity, , , or other?" published in , which examined mirative markers in and argued for their independence from evidentiality while proposing mediation as a related but separate dimension. In 2012, key developments included Nathan W. Hill's critical article "“Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects" in , which challenged the validity of mirativity as a and reinterpreted markers like ḥdug as sensory evidentials. In response, Scott DeLancey's "Didn't you know? Mirativity does exist!" in the same journal defended the category's independence, analyzing data from Romance and Balkan languages to counter reductions to pragmatic effects. (Detailed discussion of these debates appears in the "Debates and Criticisms" section.) In 2016, Tyler Peterson's paper "Mirativity as Surprise: Evidentiality, Information, and " advanced semantic understanding by developing tests to distinguish mirative from evidential meanings, drawing on data from Yucatec Maya to illustrate how miratives signal speaker surprise independent of information source. This contributed diagnostic tools for identifying mirativity in fieldwork. By 2020, cross-linguistic research on mirativity had grown substantially, with documentation of mirative features in over 100 languages across families, as reflected in typological studies and databases focused on grammatical categories.

Semantic Analysis

Core Semantic Features

Mirativity fundamentally encodes two interrelated semantic features: counterexpectation and novelty. Counterexpectation refers to the violation of the speaker's prior presuppositions or expectations about a , presenting it as surprising or contrary to what was anticipated. Novelty, on the other hand, highlights that the information was previously inaccessible to the speaker, marking it as newly acquired rather than part of their established epistemic background. These features together convey the speaker's epistemic unpreparedness, distinguishing mirativity from categories like , which primarily address the source of information rather than the speaker's attitudinal response to its unexpectedness. The primary triggers for mirative interpretations involve sudden discoveries, realizations, or resolutions of that disrupt the speaker's prior state. For instance, expressions equivalent to "I just found out that..." in English capture moments of abrupt , such as unexpectedly witnessing an event or piecing together previously overlooked . These triggers often arise from direct or that exceeds the speaker's expectations, leading to an immediate shift in . In terms of interpretations, mirative markers imply a temporal consisting of a preparatory phase of or psychological unpreparedness, followed by an abrupt transition to of the proposition's truth. This conveys the as freshly surprising without altering the speaker's commitment to its factuality, though the emphasis lies on the epistemic novelty rather than itself. For example, a mirative might assert that "it is raining" while underscoring the speaker's prior unawareness of this fact, evoking a of . Mirativity exhibits gradations in intensity, with strong mirativity signaling high levels of surprise or shock tied to immediate, intense counterexpectation, as in exclamatory reactions to profound unexpectedness. Weak mirativity, by contrast, indicates milder forms of unexpectedness, often limited to the recognition of novelty without the full emotive force of surprise. These degrees allow for nuanced expression of the speaker's epistemic response, varying cross-linguistically based on contextual factors like the magnitude of the expectation violation.

Theoretical Frameworks

Scott DeLancey's cognitive framework conceptualizes mirativity as a within the experiential domain of , where markers encode the speaker's reaction to information that is newly acquired through direct , thereby distinguishing online processing of immediate, surprising events from offline access to pre-existing . This approach underscores mirativity's role in signaling novelty or counterexpectation, as opposed to routine or anticipated , and has been influential in typological studies of how languages grammaticalize cognitive states of unpreparedness. In formal semantics, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald's presuppositional approach treats mirative constructions as presupposing the speaker's prior lack of knowledge about the proposition, capturing the essence of surprise through an inference of sudden discovery or unprepared mind. This framework highlights mirativity's independence from while emphasizing its cross-linguistic from related categories like aspects. A surprise-based model, developed by Jessica Rett and Sarah E. Murray in 2013, integrates mirativity with propositional attitude verbs within possible worlds semantics, representing surprise as a induced by counterexpectation relative to the speaker's epistemic alternatives. This theory formalizes mirative content as an update to the speaker's attitudes, where the conflicts with prior expectations in the accessible worlds, akin to embeddings under verbs like "surprise" that evaluate epistemic accessibility and novelty. It extends earlier cognitive ideas by providing a truth-conditional basis for how miratives alter the common ground of discourse. Vesela Simeonova's further refines these ideas by modeling mirativity through update semantics, which captures shifts in the speaker's knowledge state upon encountering unexpected information. In this account, a mirative operator updates the discourse context by incorporating the new , presupposing that it is less expected than at least one false alternative on a speaker-relative scale of contextual expectedness. The approach treats mirativity as a context-changing operator independent of evidential presuppositions, applicable to focus-sensitive constructions that evoke alternatives. More recent work, such as Lingzi Zhuang's 2023 dissertation, advances a comprehensive semantic of mirativity as an expressive category, integrating surprise with epistemic and attitudinal updates across languages. Cross-theoretically, mirativity aligns variably with broader modal logics, which analyze it as an epistemic operator scoping above propositional content to express possibility or necessity relative to surprise-inducing worlds, and purely pragmatic accounts, which derive its effects from conversational implicatures such as violations of or in . Modal frameworks, as in analyses of evidential-mirative interactions, offer compositional denotations that integrate with tense and aspect, whereas pragmatic views emphasize inference from non-mirative markers, resolving debates over mirativity's categorical status through Gricean reasoning. These perspectives converge on mirativity's core function of highlighting epistemic disruption but diverge in whether the effect is encoded semantically or inferred dynamically.

Grammatical Coding

Morphological and Syntactic Markers

Mirativity is frequently encoded through morphological markers, most commonly as verbal suffixes in languages with rich inflectional systems. These suffixes often attach to the stem to signal the speaker's surprise or the unexpected nature of the , integrating into the verb's tense-aspect-mood as a dedicated category or as an extension of existing forms. For instance, in agglutinative languages, such suffixes may contrast with non-mirative tenses, typically aligning with imperfective or present-oriented aspects to emphasize the immediacy of the realization. Prefixes and clitics are less prevalent but occur in some typological profiles, where they modify the or attach to to convey mirative overtones without altering the core lexical meaning. Syntactic constructions also serve as markers of mirativity, often involving auxiliary elements or restructured predicates to highlight emergent or counterexpectational events. auxiliaries, such as or completive verbs combined with main s, create periphrastic expressions that grammaticalize surprise, as seen in emergent mirative uses in analytic languages. In other cases, copula insertions form complex predicates, where a nominalized or participial form of the verb combines with a copula to express sudden discovery, a pattern observed in areal phenomena like the through admirative strategies involving auxiliary copulas. These constructions typically maintain the verb's aspectual properties while adding a layer of pragmatic marking for unpreparedness. Within tense-aspect-mood systems, mirative markers form systematic oppositions, often occupying a slot parallel to evidentials or modals, and are restricted to contexts of new or startling information rather than established . They may appear as a distinct cell, such as a "sudden discovery" tense, or as allomorphic variants conditioned by aspect, favoring imperfectives to capture ongoing realizations. This integration ensures miratives contrast with neutral assertions, reinforcing their role in information structure. Diachronically, mirative markers commonly arise through grammaticalization paths from evidentials, where non-firsthand or inferential forms extend to mirative functions to mark counterexpectation. Other sources include progressives, which shift to emphasize unexpected ongoing events, and resultatives, which evolve to highlight surprising outcomes. These paths often involve bleaching of original meanings, leading to dedicated mirative morphology in the target .

Interaction with Tense and Aspect

Mirative markers frequently exhibit tense restrictions, often being incompatible with perfective past forms in certain languages because the expression of surprise is inherently linked to the speaker's current realization of newly acquired information, rather than distant or completed events. For instance, mirative uses in some languages are limited to contexts implying present or recent surprise, avoiding strict past perfective interpretations that would disconnect the event from the moment of discovery. This constraint underscores how mirativity anchors the proposition to the speaker's epistemic update in the non-past domain, preventing its application to fully backgrounded historical narratives. Aspectual affinities in mirative constructions commonly overlap with imperfective or aspects, as these encode processes of ongoing discovery or the fresh apprehension of results that align with the sudden of unexpected into the speaker's . In perfects across various languages, such as those in Turkic families, the mirative reading arises from the aspect's focus on a newly realized state, reflecting the speaker's counterexpectation without requiring evidential specification. Imperfective markers, by portraying events as unfolding or habitual yet surprising in the present context, further facilitate this overlap, emphasizing the dynamic nature of the epistemic shift. In languages such as Albanian, systemic effects of mirativity manifest in the contrast between the mirative present, which conveys surprise regarding unexpected ongoing events, and the non-mirative , used for expected or neutral completed actions. For example, the mirative present form po pi (he is drinking) expresses astonishment at a currently observed action, while the piu without mirative marking denotes a routine event without surprise. This opposition highlights how mirative morphology integrates with the language's aspectual system to differentiate epistemic attitudes toward temporally anchored events. These interactions with tense and aspect bolster the theoretical independence of mirativity from evidential tense marking, as mirative forms can occur without indicating the source of evidence, focusing instead on the psychological impact of new information regardless of evidential constraints. Unlike evidential systems that may embed tense to specify inference or report over time, mirativity's affinities with present-oriented aspects demonstrate its role as a distinct category for marking attitudinal surprise, not evidentiary sourcing. This separation is evident in cross-linguistic patterns where mirative markers co-occur with non-evidential tenses, reinforcing mirativity's unique semantic contribution to grammatical systems.

Cross-Linguistic Distribution

Examples in Tibeto-Burman Languages

In , mirativity is expressed through specific verbal forms that highlight the speaker's sudden realization or surprise at new , often contrasting with expected states. A prototypical example involves the form kho bzo-ba yin, translating to "He is writing!" uttered with astonishment upon unexpectedly discovering the ongoing action. This marking underscores the speaker's unpreparedness for the , such as visual of an unanticipated event. In Sunwar, a Kiranti of the eastern Himalayas, mirativity is coded via particles like na or na-si, which contrast with non-mirative copulas to signal surprise in declarative statements. For instance, mi na conveys "There is a person!" in a context of sudden discovery, such as unexpectedly spotting someone in a previously assumed empty space. This auxiliary-like element emphasizes the novelty of the information, particularly in narratives where it heightens dramatic effect by distinguishing routine assertions from shocking revelations. Mirative markers are prevalent across the Tibeto-Burman family, especially in the eastern Himalayan branches, where dedicated forms appear in numerous languages; surveys of neighboring varieties document such coding in at least 14 languages, reflecting a regional areal feature. Functionally, these markers extend beyond simple surprise to enrich discourse, particularly in storytelling for plot twists and personal anecdotes. In Kurtöp, another eastern Himalayan Tibeto-Burman language, the perfective mirative suffix -na appears in narratives to convey unexpected outcomes, as in palang=gi je=do thila-the dar-na =ri ("On the bed remained a toe!"), marking the shocking residue from a folktale encounter. Similarly, in personal anecdotes, the imperfective -ta highlights self-realization, such as me-khan-ta ("I don’t know at all (how) to tell (a story)"), expressing the speaker's abrupt admission of unpreparedness during conversation. This usage integrates mirativity into broader narrative strategies, amplifying emotional engagement without overlapping with evidential specifications.

Examples in Other Language Families

Mirative phenomena extend beyond Tibeto-Burman languages, appearing in diverse families worldwide and often through morphological suffixes, particles, or semi-grammaticalized constructions that encode surprise or counterexpectation. In the Indo-European family, Albanian features an admirative mood marked by the suffix -ka, which conveys the speaker's indirect surprise or realization of newly acquired information, distinct from direct evidentiality. For instance, the standard past form shkrova ("I wrote") contrasts with the admirative kam shkruar ("I (have) written," implying surprise at the fact). This structure, common in Balkan linguistics, highlights emotional reaction to unexpected states rather than source of evidence. Turkic languages like Turkish employ the suffix -mIş, primarily an inferential evidential indicating indirect evidence, but it extends to mirative functions expressing surprise at non-witnessed or newly realized events. In contexts of counterexpectation, -mIş marks propositions as unexpectedly true based on inference, such as gel-miş ("he has come," with surprise at the arrival). This polysemy underscores how mirativity can overlap with but remain independent from evidentiality in agglutinative systems. Within the Austronesian family, Tagalog uses the second-position particle pala to signal mild surprise or counterexpectational assertions, aligning with mirative meanings of unexpected information. For example, pala softens assertions like "It turns out he's here" to convey realization of a situation contrary to prior beliefs, without evidential overtones. This particle exemplifies mirativity through discourse-level marking in verb-initial languages. Amerindian languages, such as Yucatec Maya, grammaticalize mirativity via the particle bakáan, which encodes sudden realizations or revelations in declarative contexts, often in completive aspects. Utterances with bakáan express surprise at newly apprehended facts, like a speaker's abrupt awareness of an event's completion, distinguishing it from evidential or modal markers. This form illustrates mirativity's role in illocutionary force, updating the speaker's epistemic state mid-discourse. Emerging mirative patterns appear in like English through semi-grammaticalized constructions such as end up, which underwent a diachronic shift in the late 19th and early 20th centuries toward expressing counterexpectational outcomes. Initially denoting finality (e.g., "to come to an end"), end up V-ing evolved via pragmatic inference to convey surprise, as in "He ended up winning" (), with surging in 20th-century corpora. Parenthetical uses like "Ends up, it rained" further analogize to dedicated miratives, reflecting subjectification in analytic languages.

Debates and Criticisms

Primary Criticisms

One primary criticism of mirativity as a distinct is that it reduces to , particularly indirect evidentials, rather than constituting an independent system. Victor A. Friedman argues that in Balkan languages such as Macedonian and Albanian, mirative interpretations arise as pragmatic inferences when indirect evidential markers are used to report directly witnessed events, rather than signaling a separate category of surprise or unpreparedness. This view posits that what appears as mirativity is merely a contextual extension of evidential functions, without dedicated morphology for surprise alone. Another key objection emphasizes the pragmatic nature of surprise over any dedicated grammatical encoding. Gérard Lazard contends that the expression of surprise is a universal conversational arising from context, rather than a grammaticalized feature, and that apparent mirative markers in many languages are better analyzed as extensions of mediativity—a broader category encompassing non-direct evidence sources like or . He surveys verbal systems across languages and finds little evidence for consistent, obligatory mirative morphology, suggesting that dedicated markers are rare and often overlap with evidential or modal elements. Finally, the empirical scarcity of reliably documented mirative systems has been cited to question its status as a universal or core category, potentially reflecting areal phenomena rather than widespread grammar. Typological surveys indicate mirativity is attested in around 100 languages, predominantly in clusters like Tibeto-Burman and Turkic families, suggesting through contact rather than independent development across linguistic diversity.

Responses and Recent Defenses

In response to criticisms that mirative meanings can be reduced to pragmatic inferences or extensions of , linguists have provided empirical and theoretical defenses emphasizing the grammatical independence of mirativity across diverse languages. Scott DeLancey, in his 2012 survey, reasserts mirativity as a distinct cross-linguistic category by examining constructions in languages such as Tibetan, Hare (Athabaskan), Turkish, and Sunwar (Tibeto-Burman), where mirative markers encode the novelty or unexpectedness of information irrespective of its source. These examples demonstrate that mirative forms contrast systematically with non-mirative counterparts in the same paradigms, using contextual tests to show that the category signals a speaker's epistemic unpreparedness rather than mere indirect evidence, thereby countering claims of pragmatic derivability. Theoretical refinements further bolster this position by highlighting dedicated grammatical markers in non-evidential contexts. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (2012) argues against reducing mirativity to through minimal pairs in Amazonian languages like Shipibo-Konibo (Panoan), where specific verbal suffixes or auxiliaries exclusively convey surprise or sudden realization without implying inferential or reported sources. For instance, in Shipibo-Konibo, the marker -mein expresses counter-expectation in direct sensory contexts, distinct from evidential forms, underscoring mirativity's semantic autonomy in polysynthetic systems typical of the region. Recent empirical work has extended these defenses by quantifying mirative gradations in understudied languages. In a corpus-based analysis of Odia (Indo-Aryan), Maarten Lemmens and Kalyanamalini Sahoo (2018) demonstrate how light verbs such as 'rise' (uth-), 'give' (de-), and 'fall' (padi-) profile varying degrees of aspectual unexpectedness, refuting critiques through frequency patterns in natural texts: 'rise' constructions, for example, occur predominantly (over 70% in their sample) with events of abrupt discovery, forming non-parasitic mirative expressions. This approach reveals mirativity as a scalable grammatical tied to constructional semantics, rather than a uniform pragmatic overlay. To address methodological concerns about distinguishing grammatical mirativity from conversational , scholars have proposed standardized diagnostics centered on epistemic state shifts. Tyler Peterson (2017) outlines tests to probe mirative meanings, focusing on surprise as a core feature and developing methods to identify mirative expressions across languages. These tools enable cross-linguistic comparisons, confirming mirativity's categorial status in numerous documented cases, with ongoing refinements in semantic modeling as of 2025, including workshops on related evidential and mirative constructions.

References

  1. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.1997.1.1.33
  2. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(01)80001-1
  3. https://doi.org/10.1017/S004740331200010X
  4. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2012.014
  5. https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Rett/Rett%20Sturman%20WCCFL.pdf
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