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Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 41:4 (2017) ► pp.843–871

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Marking the unexpected

Evidence from Navajo to support a metadiscourse domain

 | University of California, Santa Barbara
Published online: 30 March 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.16048.pal
Abstract
Typological discussions of mirativity often consider the relationship between mirativity and evidentiality (. 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 11. 33–52. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2001. The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3). 371–384. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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 ( (ed.). 2015. Navajo conversational corpus, compiled with support from National Science Foundation DEL grant BCS-0853598.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar NSF-DEL project 0853598). The enclitic most frequently functions as an interrogative in information questions (Young, Robert W. & William Morgan. 1987. The Navajo language. A grammar and colloquial dictionary. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), 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, Leila. 2012. Evidentiality, modality, focus and other puzzles. In Andrea C. Schalley (ed.), Practical theories and empirical practice, 185–243. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mirativity in context
    • 2.1Mirativity
    • 2.2Evidentials & epistemic modality
    • 2.3Mirativity, focus & metadiscourse
  • 3.Diné bizaad
  • 4.Methods
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Interrogative constructions
    • 5.2Mirative constructions
    • 5.3Reported speech constructions
    • 5.4Contrastive focus constructions
    • 5.5Lexicalizations
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Comparative Athabaskan evidence
    • 6.2A broader characterization of lá
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (60)
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