In February, I made a little post reaching out to the Langsky community on Bluesky to ask for some ideas I could read up and talk about in a monthly stream series that I have been doing. One of the responses I got was the concept of mirativity, something that I have not really heard of until reading that comment. Now, having done my reading and research, and even talking about what I have learned on stream, it is time to put this into writing, and address two important questions. What is mirativity, and how do linguists assess the presence of such a grammatical feature in the world’s languages?

For the past couple of centuries, linguists have proposed a certain grammatical function used to communicate or express how the speaker is related to the information that they are communicating. Things like ‘The house is newly built’ could be expressed as something that the speaker has directly seen, heard from others, or through other sensory inputs. This category here is called evidentiality. Briefly put, and quoting A.Y. Aikhenvald here, evidentiality is essentially “A linguistic category whose primary meaning is source of information”.

The contexts in which evidentiality may be expressed are quite varied, from reported or quoted speech to direct knowledge, some of these may be encoded in grammatical expressions in some languages, or follow semantic lines in others. For example, in English, reported speech may be expressed as “he said that…”, which follow more semantic lines, though the suffix ‘-ish‘ in expressions like “The rent for this apartment is okayish” may convey connotations like uncertainty, and may be interpreted as a grammatical category. The Eastern Pomo language, however, has separate suffixes that distinguish between direct knowledge (-a), hearsay (-le), inference (-ine), and other sensory input (-ink’e).

Early roots of the proposal for the mirative may be traced to the Albanian language, where the use of evidentiality is optional. Here, there seems to be an ‘admirative’ form that is used to express ‘surprise’ or ‘disagreement’, and has conjugated forms by tense (present, imperfect, present perfect, and past perfect). This is formed using conjugated forms of the verb kam (to have) as a suffix. This has traditionally been lumped together with the concept of evidentiality, where the admirative could be argued as having some sort of sensory involvement in the grammar category.

This brings us to 1997, when a paper was published that talked about the the concept of mirativity. Written by the linguist Scott DeLancey, he raised various pieces of evidence from some of the world’s languages that demonstrated mirative marking, and that this could spark further academic interest, such as in testing and studying this grammatical category, down the line. In this paper, he argued that mirativity should constitute a distinct grammatical category from evidentiality, as it reflects upon the speaker’s overall knowledge structure in a given context. Amongst the examples raised, the most notable piece of evidence used to support this grammatical concept was that in the Turkish language, by comparing the two sentences:

• Kemal geldi
• Kemal gelmiş

Both essentially translate to ‘Kemal came’ in Turkish, but the second sentence, according to my contacts who are native speakers of the Turkish language, conveyed the meaning of ‘something that happened but the speaker does not have direct knowledge of, or the speaker has just been made aware of’. An additional comparison from one of my contacts was made using the Old Japanese grammatical particle けり (keri). While derived from the contraction of 來 (‘to come’) and‎ あり (‘to be’), almost quite literally translating to ‘to come to be’, this particle carries the meaning of ‘the speaker has just realised something’ or ‘the speaker has already realised something, and points out a certain explanation’.

Other pieces of evidence raised in DeLancey’s 1997 publication included the word lõ in the Hare language (or Slavey, Sahtúgot’įné Yatı̨́, Dené Dháh), the copula /’baak/ in the Sunwar language, and the suffix 군 (kun) in Korean. These have been argued to constitute their own separate grammatical category from the evidentiality category, with further work leading to Aikhenvald’s 2012 publication which laid out the core meanings of mirativity, as

• Sudden discovery or realisation
• Surprise
• Unpreparedness
• Counterexpectation 
• New information

These are communicated with relation to the speaker, the addressee, the audience, or even a certain main character. The key takeaway from these is, they all involve some form of interaction between two or more parties, with the knowledge of the state of the conversation in that specific context. This way, an appearance or occurrence of something may be seen as any of these underlying meanings, and would be expressed as such.

Nevertheless, over time, some linguists have poked some holes in DeLancey’s evidence used to substantiate his proposal for the presence of mirative markers in some languages. This brings us to Hill’s response to Delancey’s publication, mainly pertaining to the interpretation of the Lhasa Tibetan word འདུག་ (ḥdug).

In Lhasa Tibetan, there is a group of words known as the existential copula. This group of words roughly translate to the verbs ‘to be’ or ‘to have’ in English, but the ‘existential’ part pays particular attention to an existential feature or thing as referred to by the speaker. This comes in contrast to the essential copula. A possible parallel distinction would be the ser vs. estar differences seen in languages like Spanish and Portuguese.

The existential copula ḥdug is known by many linguists as a testimonial marker, which expresses the speaker’s personal experience with what is being said. In many cases, this would involve sensory experiences like sight and hearing, and thus constitute what is known as an evidential marker. Because one cannot experience the future, at least that is true as of today, there is no future tense of the copula ḥdug, although there are some use cases for the immediate future, in expressions such as ‘it looks like the weather will be good today’.

Delancey’s interpretations for the word ḥdug have been criticised for changing from publication to publication, something that Hill noted in his critique. Another key point of criticism is, Hill viewed the word ḥdug as something that carries sensory involvement, as this is also used in reporting what a speaker has dreamed about, as well as reporting illnesses. Additionally, Hill has also gone on to criticise DeLancey’s other examples, suggesting that miratives marked “non-confirmation” and “lack of observation”, something that related to sensory involvement as well.

Hill’s interpretations and critique have drawn counterarguments from DeLancey and Zeisler, amongst others, though Zeisler suggested that the ḥdug reflects more on the speaker’s attitude than evidentiality or mirativity that Hill and DeLancey argued respectively.

Now, this leaves us with a little gap in knowledge. Given the various means through which linguists have proposed for the expression of mirativity in the world’s languages, how do linguists test for this very grammatical category? This is where we will take a look at Tyler Peterson’s publications covering this specific aspect, coming to you in a future introduction.

Further Reading

Aikhenvald, A.Y. (2004) Evidentiality, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Aikhenvald, A.Y. (2012) ‘The essence of mirativity’, Linguistic Typology, 16(3), pp. 435-485.

DeLancey, S. (1997) ‘Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information’, Linguistic Typology, 1, pp. 33-52.

Delancey, S. (2012) ‘Still mirative after all these years’, Linguistic Typology, 16(3), pp. 529-564.

Hill, N.W. (2012) ‘”Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects’, Linguistic Typology, 16(3), pp. 389-433.

Makartsev, M. (2013) ‘Towards evidentiality markers in Albanian and Macedonian bilingual political discourse’, Current Studies in Slavic Linguistics, 146, pp. 139-148.

Slobin, D. & Aksu, A. (1982) ‘Tense, aspect, and modality in the use of the Turkish evidential’, Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics, pp. 185-200.

Zeisler, B. (2018) ‘Don’t believe in a paradigm that you haven’t manipulated yourself! – Evidentiality, speaker attitude, and admirativity in Ladakhi’, Himalayan Linguistics, 17(1), pp. 67-130.