In this paper, I will discuss the status of the so-called admirative in the Bulgarian grammatical system, with special focus on its relation to the perfect, evidentiality and inferentiality. I will argue that admirative constructions in Bulgarian are better analyzed within the framework of the strict theory of enunciation (Bally, Benveniste, Culioli, Desclés…). In the first part of this paper, I will focus on the morphological patterns specific to Bulgarian and discuss the semantics of the phenomenon. I will also survey other analyses of the issue. In the second part, I will demonstrate that the surprise expressed by admirative constructions, marked by exclamatory intonation and clearly identified by context, exclamatory particles and interjections, results from the discrepancy between what is expected and what is observed.