Anti-mirativity in Romance

The paper discusses four cognate adverbial particles in Camuno, Italian,Romanian, and Spanish. These are modal particles that mark the content of a proposition as trivial, obvious, or already part of the common ground. The semantic import of the particles is modeled by reversing a common treatment of scalar adverbs like even: the particles indicate that the hosting proposition is the most likely with respect to the set of its focus alternatives. In terms of licensing conditions, anti-mirative particles are generally employed in mirative contexts where speakers signal their surprise over the mismatch between their expectations and the actual state of affairs in the utterance world

Adverbial · Modal · Negation · Proposition · Surprise · Utterance · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation