The mirative and evidentiality

DeLancey, Scott

doi:10.1016/s0378-2166(01)80001-1

Cited by 346 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…This contrasts with previous accounts of similar such effects (see inter alia DeLancey 1997DeLancey , 2001Rett 2009;Peterson 2013;Rett & Murray 2013), which rely on the analysis that the state of affairs denoted by the prejacent is not part of a contextually available set of the speaker's personal expectations, and therefore not expected to occur.…”

Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 76%

Discourse update at the service of mirativity effects: the case of the Discursive Dative

Siegal

Boneh

2016

SALT

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Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 76%

Discourse update at the service of mirativity effects: the case of the Discursive Dative

Siegal

Boneh

2016

SALT

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“…Two major features of evidential systems are particularly relevant in this respect. First, despite the considerable variability of evidential systems cross-linguistically (Aikhenvald & Dixon, 2001;Anderson, 1986;Chafe & Nichols, 1986;Cinque, 1999;Delancey, 2002;Faller, 2002;Garrett, 2000;Givón, 1982;De Haan,1998Ifantidou, 2001;Izvorski, 1998;Johanson & Utas, 2000;Kratzer, 1991;Mayer, 1990;Mushin, 2001;Palmer, 1986;Papafragou, 2000;Speas, 2004;Willett, 1988), the semantics of evidential morphology seems to draw in systematic ways from a relatively restricted range of basic evidential concepts. According to Willett (1988), who surveyed data from 32 languages, there are three main types of source of information that are encoded grammatically: direct access (in particular, perception), reports from others, and reasoning (where the last two fall under indirect access).…”

Section: John Was Apparently Singingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidentiality in language and cognition

et al. 2007

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What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3-and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable ☆ We wish to thank Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Eleni Miltsakaki, and the other members of the CHEESE seminar at the University of Pennsylvania for discussion of this project. Thanks also to Seungyun Yang for experimental help. This research was partly supported by NIH/NRSA Grants #F32MH065020 to Anna Papafragou and #1F32HD043532 to Peggy Li and by SSHRC Grant #410-2003-0544 to Chung-hye Han. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: papafragou@psych.udel.edu ,pegs@wjh.harvard.edu, youngonc@sas.upenn.edu, chunghye@sfu.ca. 15 Again, the basic results do not change regardless of the which linguistic score was compared with which non-linguistic score. There is always an effect of Task (Non-linguistic better than Linguistic), and always an effect of Task × Age (with a larger Age effect for Nonlinguistic than Linguistic tasks). 24 Such mapping problems have been originally pointed out and discussed in the context of learning procedures for mental verbs (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Gleitman, 1990;Papafragou, Cassidy, Gleitman, & Hulbert, 2004;Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). As these authors point out, observational cues to the meaning of mental verbs such as think or believe are few and impoverished compared to those for action verbs such as catch or eat. On at least some occas...

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“…20 Despite being generally associated with the speaker's surprise (DeLancey 1997(DeLancey , 2001) in her survey of the central properties of the mirative systems across languages, Aikhenvald (2012) points out that mirativity may also reflect the addressee's or the conversation participants' surprise or unexpectedness. In !Xun, for example, the mirative marker, which can occur both in statements and in questions, can also mark information that is new and surprising to the addressee or to the audience, so that an event is not necessarily marked as unexpected to the speaker alone, "but to anyone involved in the conversation" (Aikhenvald 2012: 448, citing König 2013.…”

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confidence: 99%

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

Bianchi

Bocci

Cruschina

2016

S&P

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This paper discusses the fronting of a focal constituent to a clauseinitial position which, in various languages, is associated with an import of unexpectedness. We provide prosodic and syntactic evidence from Italian showing that this phenomenon has distinctive grammatical properties with respect to other instances of "focus fronting". We argue that the fronted constituent bears narrow focus, and that the unexpectedness import conveys that the asserted proposition is less likely than one or more distinct focus alternatives (see Grosz 2011). We characterize this import as a conventional implicature, and we argue that likelihood is interpreted with respect to an informative modal base which is shared by the conversational community (the context set). We show that the unexpectedness import expressed by a speaker can be accepted or rejected by the other discourse participants: thus, it qualifies as an evaluative commitment of the speaker and, when accepted by the interlocutors, it can give rise to a shared evaluation.

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The mirative and evidentiality

Cited by 346 publications

References 9 publications

Discourse update at the service of mirativity effects: the case of the Discursive Dative

Discourse update at the service of mirativity effects: the case of the Discursive Dative

Evidentiality in language and cognition

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures

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