Affiliation:
1. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Abstract
Abstract
In this study, we are addressing the call for further research
(Aikhenvald 2015) into how
languages, in our case Modern Greek, mark the unexpected. Our first research
question is: Can we identify a class of mirative evidential markers in Modern
Greek? The expected answer is that we can, if we take account of frequency rates
in a variety of sources in the real world, namely plays, corpora and tags in
social media. The second research question is: Do these markers convey
propositional or non-propositional meaning? Our findings suggest that the Greek
data involves predominantly non-propositional types of meaning since mirativity
is not delivered by the semantic content of the utterance (e.g., Ooo! Tí
vlépoun ta mátia mou? “Oh! What do I see?”, Ma ti les tóra?
“But what are you saying now?”, Ba ba ti akoúo?
“Well, well, what do I hear?” Mi mou pis! ‘Don’t tell
me!’).
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
History and Philosophy of Science,Behavioral Neuroscience,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,General Computer Science