A semantic account of mirative evidentials

By Jessica Rett, Sarah E. Murray. 2013

88 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98712a0a153845b0300792078ee7d1f154110eb4