Volume 16, Issue 3

In two recent handbook articles, Beckman & Venditti (2010, 2011) present overviews of tone and intonation which take issue with both traditional typology and recent attempts to bring clarity to the study of prosodic typology. In the course of their coverage Beckman & Venditti question the “usefulness” of distinguishing prosodic systems by “tonemic function alone” (e.g., lexical tone, stress, intonation) and raise the question “Is typology needed?” Within this context I once again argue for a “property-driven” approach to prosodic typology whose goal is not to classify languages into prosodic types, rather to accurately characterize the same vs. different ways in which prosodic properties are exploited. We thus ask (i) whether a given language has word-level contrastive pitch (“tone”), word-level metrical structure (“stress”), both, or neither; (ii) if yes, what does the prosodic system do with the tones and/or stress, both at the word level and postlexically? Given the level-ordered nature of phonological systems, only after the first two questions are dealt with can we move on to the the question with which Beckman & Venditti are most concerned: (iii) how are the surface or output word-prosodic properties integrated with phrase- and utterance-level intonation? While Beckman & Venditti question the usefulness of “broad-stroke typologies” which have traditionally distinguished tone, stress, and intonation, their disposition to minimize systemic differences in favor of surface comparisons of phonetic realizations raises important questions concerning levels of representation and the nature of phonological typology itself.

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mirative” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described ḥdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard's “mediative” (1999) or Johanson's “indirective” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis.

The range of mirative meanings across the world's languages subsumes sudden discovery, surprise, and unprepared mind of the speaker (and also the audience or the main character of a story). Mirative markers may also convey overtones of counterexpectation and new information. The range of mirative meanings may be expressed through a verbal affix, a complex predicate, or a pronoun. Evidentials whose major function is to express information source may have mirative extensions, especially in the context of the 1st person subject. The mirative category appears to be susceptible to linguistic diffusion.

This article argues, contra Hill (this volume), that mirativity is an independent linguistic category. It also argues, contra DeLancey (1997), that this category should be defined not only in terms of newsworthiness for the speaker but also in terms of newsworthiness for the addressee, and that expressions of mirativity do not necessarily have an evidential component. These claims are supported by examples of mirative expressions in a number of languages from different genetic stocks. Finally, the article suggests an explanation for the fact that in many languages evidentiality and mirativity are indeed expressed by the same linguistic means.

Albanian admiratives specify a complex of meanings including `surprise', `disbelief', and `report'. “Non-confirmative” summarizes these in contrast to Macedonian's “confirmative”. Macedonian synthetic preterites specify speaker confirmation, and Macedonian analytic preterites therefore include - but are not limited to - non-confirmation. Albanian synthetic pasts do not specify confirmativity, and admiratives specify a present (disbelief, report) or previous (surprise) state when the speaker would not confirm the event. The Albanian admirative is used where similar Balkan Slavic and Turkish paradigmatic sets are not. The category “mirative” is unnecessary for the Balkan languages, but “admirative” describes the specific intersection of non-confirmative meanings of Albanian.

This article re-presents the case, first presented in DeLancey (1997), for the mirative as a crosslinguistic category, and responds to critiques of that work by Gilbert Lazard and Nathan Hill. The nature of the mirative, a category which marks a statement as representing information which is new or unexpected, is exemplified with data from Kham (Tibeto-Burman) and Hare (Athabaskan). The mirative category is shown to be distinct from the well-known mediative or indirective evidential category. Finally, the role of mirativity in the complex verbal systems of Tibetan languages is briefly outlined.