Mirative

Grammatical categories
Affect Polarity Agreement Animacy Argument/Complement/Adjunct Associated motion Associativity Boundedness Branching Classifier Clusivity Comparison Construct state Contrast Countability/Uncountability Dative construction/Quirky subject Dative shift Declension Definiteness Evidentiality Feature Focus Genitive construction Aspect Case Conjugation Grammatical gender/Noun class Mood Number Person Tense Honorifics Incorporation Inflection Lexical aspect (Aktionsart) Modality Markedness Mirativity Negation Pluractionality Polypersonal agreement Possession Predicate Reciprocity Serial verb construction Singulative-Collective-Pluractive Specificity Subject/Object Suffixaufnahme (Case stacking) Telicity Tense–aspect–mood Thematic relation (Agent/Patient) Topic and Comment Transitivity Valency Voice Volition

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

DeLancey (1997) first promoted the mirative as a cross-linguistic category, identifying Turkish, Hare, Sunwar, Lhasa Tibetan, and Korean as languages exhibiting this category. Citing DeLancey as a predecessor, many researchers have reported miratives in other languages, especially Tibeto-Burman languages. However, Lazard (1999) and Hill (2012) question the validity of this category, Lazard finding that the category cannot be distinguished from a mediative, and Hill finds the evidence given by DeLancey and by Aikhenvald (2004) either incorrect or insufficient. DeLancey (2012) promotes Hare, Kham, and Magar as clear cases of miratives, conceding that his analysis of Tibetan had been incorrect. He makes no mention of Turkish, Sunwar, or Korean. Hill (2015) provides an alternative analysis of Hare, re-analyzing DeLancey's evidence for 'mirativity' as direct evidentiality. Navajo has mirativity in combination with evidentiality.

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. They may therefore sometimes be translated using the English "apparently".

References

• Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-926388-2.
• DeLancey, Scott (1997). "Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information". Linguistic Typology. 1: 33–52. doi:10.1515/lity.1997.1.1.33.
• DeLancey, Scott (2001). "The mirative and evidentiality". Journal of Pragmatics. 33 (3): 369–382. doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(01)80001-1.
• DeLancey, Scott (2001). "Still mirative after all these years". Journal of Pragmatics. 33 (3): 529–564. doi:10.1515/lity-2012-0020.
• Dickinson, Connie (2000). "Mirativity in Tsafiki". Studies in Language. 24 (2): 379–422. doi:10.1075/sl.24.2.06dic.
• Hill, Nathan W. (2012). "'Mirativity' does not exist: ḥdug in 'Lhasa' Tibetan and other suspects". Linguistic Typology. 16 (3): 389–433. doi:10.1515/lity-2012-0016.
• Hill, Nathan W. (2015). "Hare lõ: the touchstone of mirativity". SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics. 13 (2): 24–31.
• Lazard, Gilbert. (2009). "Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other?". Linguistic Typology. 3 (1): 91–109. doi:10.1515/lity.1999.3.1.91.
• Slobin, Dan I.; Aksu, Ayhan A. (1982). "Tense, aspect and modality in the use of the Turkish evidential" (PDF). In Hopper, Paul J. Tense-aspect: Between semantics & pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 185–200. ISBN 978-90-272-2865-9.

External links

• Summary of mirative postings at LinguistList (includes bibliography)