Anti-mirativity in Romance: the case of po, poi, pues, and pˇai

Abstract

The paper discusses four cognate adverbial particles in Camuno, Italian,
Romanian, and Spanish. These are modal particles that mark the content of a proposition as trivial, obvious, or already part of the common ground. The semantic import of the particles is modeled by reversing a common treatment of scalar adverbs like even: the particles indicate that the hosting proposition is the most likely with respect to the set of its focus alternatives. In terms of licensing conditions, anti-mirative particles are generally employed in mirative contexts where speakers signal their surprise over the mismatch between their expectations and the actual state of affairs in the utterance world.