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Mirativity as Surprise: Evidentiality, Information, and Deixis

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Abstract

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 showing how 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.

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Notes

  1. For example, the reader is referred to a special issue of Linguistic Typology (2012, Vol. 16, No. 3).

  2. See Schützwohl (1998) Reisenzein (2000) and for a comprehensive overview on the history and evaluation of research on surprise.

  3. Simulated data and graphs adapted from Brooks (2012).

  4. See Lewis (1986) for a probabilistic approach to knowledge, and McCready and Ogata (2007) and Davis et al. (2007) for a probabilistic approach to knowledge and evidentiality utilizing possible worlds instead of model spaces.

  5. The metaphorical uses of are not discussed in this paper; See Peterson (2010b) for details.

  6. Another complicating factor involving the mirative and reportative data in the Quechuan languages is that most of the examples given are taken from narratives. In fact, Aikhenvald (2004: 202) acknowledges that in Quechua folk tales and traditional narratives always contain the reportative evidential, which functions as a genre marker. This observation itself neutralizes any claim of the reportative expressing mirativity on its own.

  7. This distinction (and variations on it) is of course a classic one, with roots in Bar-Hillel and Carnap (1953).

  8. See Barwise and Seligman (1997) for a similar discussion along these lines. Within a standard possible worlds analysis of modality, \(F(\alpha )\)-knowledge and k-knowledge correspond to the modal base an ordering source, respectively (Kratzer 1991; Peterson 2012; a.o.). In the following subsection I show how k-knowledge corresponds to a person’s active schema. Also see McCready and Ogata (2007), Davis et al. (2007) for probabilistic accounts of information and evidentiality.

  9. It is possible to recreate a sense of surprise at a piece of information that has already been mentally assimilated by a speaker. For example, one might say ‘You’re smoking!’ as a surprised reaction (encoded by ‘surprised’ intonation in English) upon encountering a friend who recently stopped smoking. Having assimilated this surprising new information, one can later report this event to another friend by exclaiming ‘he was smoking!’ (also with the surprised intonational contour ‘!’). However, I believe this is akin to reporting surprise, and not as a reaction of surprise to the previously assimilated information.

  10. Although this claim requires further investigation.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210025, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Tyler Peterson

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Special thanks to my Gitksan consultants Barbara Sennott, Leiwa Weget, Louise Wilson, and my Turkish consultant Hande Ergun. For the useful advice and support, thanks to Tom Bever, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Dane Bell, and the members of the Cognition, Language And Neuroscience Lab at the University of Arizona. Research on the Gitksan language was made possible by a grant from The Endangered Languages Documentation Program (SOAS) awarded to the author. Data that is not cited is from fieldwork, and all errors and any possible misinterpretations of secondary data are solely my responsibility. Portions of the analyses presented in this paper previously appeared in Peterson (2015).

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Peterson, T. Mirativity as Surprise: Evidentiality, Information, and Deixis. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 1327–1357 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9408-9

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