The mirative and evidentiality

Evidentiality refers to the grammatical marking of the source of evidence for a proposition; mirativity refers to the marking of a proposition as representing information which is new to the speaker. Mirativity has sometimes been thought of as part of the larger category of evidentiality. Based on evidence from Tibetan, Hare, and other languages, it is argued here that mirativity must be recognized as a distinct semantic and grammatical category. The existence in many languages of a form which combines mirative and inferential readings can be explained in terms of the interaction of mirativity and aspect: The combination of mirative marking and perfective aspect will naturally tend to be interpreted as inferential, since an event in the past will ordinarily be new information to the speaker only if his or her knowledge of it derives from secondary evidence rather than from direct perception. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.