A semantic account of mirative evidentials
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v23i0.2687Keywords:
evidentials, mirativity, exclamationAbstract
Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a common epistemic component. A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content.Downloads
Published
2013-08-24
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Articles appearing in SALT are published under an author agreement with the Linguistic Society of America and are made available to readers under a Creative Commons Attribution License.