Surprises in Tibetan: a preliminary investigation of mirativity in Tibetan languages By Jesse P Gates

https://www.academia.edu/1501904/Surprises_in_Tibetan_a_preliminary_investigation_of_mirativity_in_Tibetan_languages?nav_from=cb41aaa4-b1a4-46fd-a45f-77ddae88b2b5 All languages have some strategy for allowing speakers to express that they are surprised or have discovered new information. Some of these strategies are accomplished through intonation or by simply adding a lexical item (e.g. ‘wow!’, ‘really!’). One strategy, which has become the object of some debate in recent years, is for a language to encode surprise and new knowledge grammatically with a morpheme or particle. Linguists have called this encoding of grammatical surprise ‘mirativity’ (Delancey 1997). Mirativity is rampant in Tibeto-Burman and particularly in Tibetan languages—fertile ground for inquiry. §2.1 and §2.2 discusses how scholars have defined and debated mirativity. §3.1 begins the transition to Tibetan languages. §3.2 and §3.3 will apply Delancey’s (1997) thoughts on mirativity’s degree of grammatical integration to Hein’s (2007) categories of ‘basic’ and ‘extended’ mirativity and S. Watters’ (2007) syntactic/pragmatic cline; all factors for consideration in Tibetan mirativity. Integrating these notions by Delancey, Hein and S. Watters, §4 explores the mirativity debate within Tibetan languages. §4.1 through 4.6 reveals mirativity’s gradience in Tibetan languages with specific case studies.