Marking the unexpected
Evidence from Navajo to support a metadiscourse domain
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20380901 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kayla Palakurthy (0000-0003-3669-6014, University of California, Santa Barbara, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 843-871 |
| Publication date | 2017-12-31 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Studies in Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0378-4177 • E-ISSN: 1569-9978 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/sl.16048.pal |
| OpenAlex | W2795253374 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 40 |
Typological discussions of mirativity often consider the relationship between mirativity and evidentiality ( DeLancey 1997 , 2001 ; Aikhenvald 2004 ). However, in interaction speakers mobilize pragmatic extensions of miratives in ways that defy specific categorization. This study analyzes the function and distribution of the Navajo enclitic lá in a Navajo Conversational Corpus ( Mithun ed 2015 NSF-DEL project 0853598). The enclitic most frequently functions as an interrogative in information questions ( Young & Morgan 1987 ), but it also encodes mirative senses including surprise, counter-expectation, discovery, and reported speech. Though the two seem synchronically unrelated, an examination of the pragmatic functions, as well as consideration of comparative Athabaskan evidence, links the polysemous enclitics as metadiscourse markers signaling contrastive focus on the unexpectedness of a proposition. These data support the interactional relevance of the semantic domain of expectation, subsuming contrastive focus and surprise ( Behrens 2012 )
Categorization · Evidentiality · Interrogative · Linguistics · Navajo · Proposition · Surprise · Communication · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
The Navajo language
Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Point of View
Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Use of the Turkish Evidential
Evidentiality
Information Structure and Sentence Form
Language and Art in the Navajo Universe
Some remarks on direct and indirect discourse in Slave (Northern Athapaskan)
Evidentiality and Mirativity
Towards an Operational Definition of Discourse Contrast
The Realis-Irrealis Distinction in Caddo, the Northern Iroquoian Languages, and English
A Grammar of Slave
Increments in Navajo conversation
Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures
Aghem Grammatical Structure
Studies in American Indian Languages
Approaches to Language Typology
Notes on Evidentiality in Hare
Still mirative after all these years
Mirativity
Evidentiality
The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space
Evidentiality and interrogativity
The mirative and evidentiality
Identificational Focus versus Information Focus
Athabaskan Language Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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