Cover not available

Article published In: The Linguistic Expression of Mirativity
Edited by Agnès Celle and Anastasios Tsangalidis
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15:2] 2017
► pp. 460–488

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Mirative fronting in German

Experimental evidence

 | University of Konstanz
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.2.07tro
Abstract
This paper presents an examination of syntactic constructions that are associated with the mirative interpretation of marking propositional content as being surprising or unexpected to the speaker. I report experimental evidence showing that certain options of marked word order in German are particularly suitable in mirative contexts. Cross-linguistic evidence offers good reasons to assume that mirative marking is also reflected in word order patterns. Having identified word order variation as one option to trigger mirative interpretations of utterances, I discuss the issue of distinguishing between information-structural and mirative effects of marked syntactic configurations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The notion of mirative fronting
  • 3.Mirative fronting: Experimental evidence
    • Materials
    • Participants
    • Results
  • 4.The distinct character of mirative fronting
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (40)
References
Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2012). The essence of mirativity. Linguistic Typology, 16(3), 435–485. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bergen, L., Goodman, N. D., & Levy, R. (2012). That’s what she (could have) said: How alternative utterances affect language use. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 120–125.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bianchi, V., Bocci, G., & Cruschina, S. (2015). Focus fronting and its implicatures. In E. O. Aboh, J. C. Schaeffer, & P. Sleeman (Eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2013: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ Amsterdam 2013 (pp. 1–20). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bianchi, V., & Cruschina, S. (2016). The derivation and interpretation of polar questions with a fronted focus. Lingua, 1701, 47–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caudal, P., & Nicolas, D. (2005). Types of degrees and types of event structures. In C. Maienborn & A. Wöllstein (Eds.), Event arguments: Foundations and applications (pp. 277–300). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruschina, S. (2012). Discourse-related features and functional projections. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruschina, S., Giurgea, I., & Remberger, E. M. (2015). Focus fronting between declaratives and exclamatives. Revue roumaine de linguistique, 601, 257–275.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
d’Avis, F. (2013). Exklamativsatz. In J. Meibauer, M. Steinbach, & H. Altmann (Eds.), Satztypen des Deutschen (pp. 171–201). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
de Reuse, W. J. (2003). Evidentiality in Western Apache. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.), Studies in evidentiality (pp. 79–100). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Degen, J., Trotzke, A., Scontras, G., Wittenberg, E., & Goodman, N. D. (2016). Definitely, maybe: Approaching speaker commitment experimentally. Ms., University of Konstanz/Stanford University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
DeLancey, S. (1997). Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology, 11, 33–52. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fanselow, G., & Lenertová, D. (2011). Left peripheral focus: Mismatches between syntax and information structure. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 291, 169–209. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1972). Troubles about actions. In D. Davidson & G. Harman (Eds.), Semantics of natural language (pp. 48–69). Dordrecht: Reidel. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frey, W. (2010). Ā-Movement and conventional implicatures: About the grammatical encoding of emphasis in German. Lingua, 1201, 1416–1435. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in English: Part 2. Journal of Linguistics, 31, 199–244. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hartmann, K., & Zimmermann, M. (2007). In place – out of place? Focus in Hausa. In K. Schwabe & S. Winkler (Eds.), On information structure, meaning and form: Generalizing across languages (pp. 365–403). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jacobs, J. (1991). Focus ambiguities. Journal of Semantics, 81, 1–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krifka, M. (1995). The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items. Linguistic Analysis, 251, 209–257.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lazard, G. (1999). Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity or other? Linguistic Typology, 31, 91–109. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morzycki, M. (2012). Adjectival extremeness: Degree modification and contextually restricted scales. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 301, 576–609. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müller, S. (2002). Complex predicates: Verbal complexes, resultative constructions and particle verbs in German. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peterson, T. (2010). Examining the mirative and nonliteral uses of evidentials. University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics, 281, 129–159.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2013). Rethinking mirativity: The expression and implication of surprise. Ms., University of Toronto [available at: [URL]].
(this volume). Problematizing mirativity.
Portner, P., & Rubinstein, A. (2016). Extreme and non-extreme deontic modals. In N. Charlow & M. Chrisman (Eds.), Deontic modality (pp. 256–282). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Potts, C. (2007). Conventional implicatures: A distinguished class of meanings. In G. Ramchand & C. Reiss (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces (pp. 475–501). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012). Conventional implicature and expressive content. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger, & P. Portner (Eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, Vol. 3 (pp. 2516–2536). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Remberger, E. M. (2014). A comparative look at focus fronting in Romance. In A. Dufter & Á. S. Octavio de Toledo (Eds.), Left sentence peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, variationist and comparative perspectives (pp. 383–418). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rett, J. (2011). Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy, 341, 411–442. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012). Miratives across constructions and languages. Talk at CUSP 5, 28 October 2012, UCSD.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rett, J., & Murray, S. E. (2013). A semantic account of mirative evidentials. Proceedings of SALT, 231, 453–472. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Skopeteas, S., & Fanselow, G. (2011). Focus and the exclusion of alternatives: On the interaction of syntactic structure with pragmatic inference. Lingua, 1211, 1693–1706. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spector, B. (2005). Scalar implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean reasoning. In M. Aloni, A. Butler, & P. Dekker (Eds.), Questions in dynamic semantics (pp. 229–254). Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trotzke, A. (2017). The grammar of emphasis: From information structure to the expressive dimension. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trotzke, A., & Turco, G. (2015). The grammatical reflexes of emphasis: Evidence from German wh-questions. Lingua, 1681, 37–56. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trotzke, A., & Wittenberg, E. (2017). Expressive particle verbs and conditions on particle fronting. Journal of Linguistics, 531, 407–435. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zanuttini, R., & Portner, P. (2003). Exclamative clauses: At the syntax-semantics interface. Language, 791, 39–81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zeisler, B. (this volume). Don’t believe in a paradigm that you haven’t manipulated yourself!: Evidentiality, speaker attitude, and admirativity in Ladakhi.
Cited by (10)

Cited by ten other publications

Cruschina, Silvio & Laia Mayol
2025. The distribution of focus and the mapping between syntax and information structure. Journal of Linguistics 61:3 ► pp. 535 ff. DOI logo
Trotzke, Andreas & Anastasia Giannakidou
2025. Exclamation, intensity, and emotive assertion. Theoretical Linguistics 51:1-2 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Ifantidou, Elly & Lemonia Tsavdaridou
2023. Mirative evidentials, relevance and non‑propositional meaning. Pragmatics & Cognition 30:1 ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
Rett, Jessica
2021. The Semantics of Emotive Markers and Other Illocutionary Content. Journal of Semantics 38:2 ► pp. 305 ff. DOI logo
Trotzke, Andreas
2020. How cool is that! A new ‘construction’ and its theoretical challenges. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 23:3 ► pp. 327 ff. DOI logo
Wierzba, Marta & Gisbert Fanselow
2020. Factors influencing the acceptability of object fronting in German. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Beltrama, Andrea & Andreas Trotzke
2019. Conveying emphasis for intensity: Lexical and syntactic strategies. Language and Linguistics Compass 13:7 DOI logo
Cruschina, Silvio
2019. Focus Fronting in Spanish: Mirative implicature and information structure. Probus 31:1 ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo
Cruschina, Silvio
2021. The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6:1 DOI logo
Destruel, Emilie, David I. Beaver & Elizabeth Coppock
2019. It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue