Mirativity

History of the concept

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. The Albanian use of admirative forms is unique in the Balkan context. It is not translatable into other languages. The expression of neutral reportedness can be rendered by 'apparently'.

While acknowledging the Balkanist term admiratives, DeLancey (1997) promoted miratives as a cross-linguistic term, which he adapted from Jacobsen's (1964) description of the Washo language. According to DeLancey (1997), Turkish, Hare, Sunwar, Lhasa Tibetan, and Korean exhibit a grammatical category to mark information that is new to the speaker.

In Turkish, the verbal suffix -miş appears in the same slot as the past tense -di.

Kemal

gel-di

'Kemal came.'

Kemal

gel-miş

'Kemal came!?'

While it is reasonable to assume that -miş marks indirect evidentiality as long as 'inference' and 'hearsay' interpretations are concerned, this does not explain the 'surprise' use of the suffix in the following sentence:

Kız-ınız

daughter-your

çok

very

iyi

good

piyano

piano

çal-ıyor-muş.

play-PRES-MIR

'Your daughter plays the piano very well!'

Citing DeLancey as a predecessor, many researchers have reported miratives in the Tibeto-Burman family and other languages.

Criticisms

Mirativity is not necessarily expressed through a category on its own; Aikhenvald (2004) points out that a mirative meaning may also be coded by using other grammatical devices such as an evidential or tense marker. This led some researchers to question the status of mirativity as a grammatical category. Lazard (1999) suggested that evidentials and miratives would be subsumed under the term mediative. Hill argued that the evidence given by DeLancey and by Aikhenvald (2004) was either wrong or insufficient.

In Lhasa Tibetan, the direct evidential verb 'dug may express mirativity in contrast to the other existential verbs, especially when it is used in a statement on the speaker themselves:

nga-r

1-LOC

deb

book

de

that

yod.

exist

'I have that book'

nga-r

1-LOC

deb

book

de

that

'dug.

exist

'I have that book [which I should have returned].'

However, the mirative account does not hold for the following sentence, where 'dug is used as an auxiliary verb and has nothing to do with surprise, sudden discovery nor unexpectedness:

nga

1

na-gi-'dug.

sick-PRES-AUX

'I'm sick at the moment.'

While DeLancey (2012) made no mention of Turkish, Sunwar or Korean, he still promoted Hare, Kham, and Magar as clear cases of miratives. Hill (2015) in response provided an alternative analysis of Hare, re-analyzing DeLancey's evidence for 'mirativity' as direct evidentiality.

Responses to criticisms

Hengeveld and Olbertz (2012) argue against Hill (2012) for miratives as a distinct category, citing data from Tarma Quechua, Ecuadorian Highland Spanish, Xamamauteri (a Yanomaman language), Kham, and Cupeño. DeLancey (2012) also argued strenuously against Hill's (2012) claims. Zeisler (2018), focusing on the Tibetic languages, considers both Hill and DeLancey to be partly wrong and partly right, and argues that the relevant categories in Tibetic languages represent grammatical marking of "speaker attitude" rather than of evidentiality.