Reconstructing Mirativity: Evidentiality, Information, and Deixis∗
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چکیده
The goal of this paper is to investigate the linguistic, psychological and cognitive properties of utterances that express the surprise of the speaker, with a focus on how grammatical evidentials are used for this purpose. This is often labeled in the linguistics literature as mirativity. While there has been a flurry of recent interest in mirativity, we still lack an understanding of how and why evidentials are used this way, and an explanation of this effect. In this paper I take steps to filling this gap by claiming that the mirativity associated with grammatical evidentials is one of the many linguistic reflexes of the more general cognitive process of surprise. I approach this by analyzing mirativity, and the language of surprise more generally, in a schema-theoretic framework enriched with the notion of new environmental information. I elaborate on the field methodological issues involved with testing the mirative use of an evidential and why they are used this way by connecting mirative evidentials to the broader phenomenon of deixis.
منابع مشابه
Examining the Mirative and Nonliteral Uses of Evidentials∗
This paper presents an analysis of how evidentiality contributes to both the mirative and metaphorical interpretations of sentences. The connection between evidentiality and mirativity has received some attention in the literature, particularily in various language grammars and typological studies, yet the category of mirativity has still not found a place within any theory of meaning. In a nut...
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There are many excellent descriptions of mirativity in various language grammars, and more recently there has been a flurry of research refining mirativity to include how languages linguistically realize surprise and related concepts such as ’unexpectedness’ and ’new information’. However, there is currently no commonly accepted set of independently motivated diagnostics for testing mirativity ...
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This paper investigates six- to nine-year-old children's acquisition of evidentiality. In two minimally different tasks we assess whether children can be made to use a particular source of information by presenting them with a specific evidential term. That is, we assess whether children have an explicit awareness of the source requirement of the evidential terms. The results demonstrate that c...
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تاریخ انتشار 2015