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Article published In:
The Linguistic Expression of Mirativity
Edited by Agnès Celle and Anastasios Tsangalidis
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15:2] 2017
► pp. 489–514

Mirativity in Spanish

The case of the particle mira

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This paper analyzes how the semantic category of mirativity is expressed by means of particles in standard Spanish. Specifically, I study the verb-based particle mira ‘look’, and argue for considering it as a mirative particle, which marks the sentence it modifies like new and unexpected information. I describe its properties in both declarative and exclamative sentences and propose a syntactic and semantic analysis. Crucially, the study of this particle permits us to look deeper into the relationship between the semantic category of mirativity and the grammatical and illocutionary category of exclamative. Assuming that mirativity and exclamativity are categories of a different nature that should be differentiated, it is shown that they are expected to coincide in some privileged constructions, where the semantic and formal contributions of the mirative mira and the exclamative construction can be isolated.

Keywords: mirativity, verb-based particles, exclamative, infinitive, left periphery
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Mira as a verb-based particle
    • 2.1Formal and distributional properties of the verb based particle mira
    • 2.2The mirative meaning of mira
  • 3.Mirativity and exclamative sentences
    • 3.1Mirative mira and wh-exclamative sentences
    • 3.2Two (almost) unnoticed Spanish mirative constructions
      • 3.2.1Degree miratives
      • 3.2.2Non-tensed miratives
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.2.08san
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