Abstract:

Mirativity is a relatively recent, notable concept in linguistic typology. It is known that expressions of mirativity have no grammatical connection to evidential systems in many languages, while in other languages, person marking systems and aspectual forms can have meanings associated with new, unexpected knowledge and surprise (Aikhenvald, 2012, p. 436). Turkish is one of the languages in which an evidential marker, -mIş, has mirative extensions. Similarly, in Japanese, mirative meanings are conveyed through the grammatical form -ta. In this study, we present the control of exclamatives and contexts on the mirative meanings comparatively in Turkish and Japanese using Aikhenvald’s classification. Our findings indicate that mirativity is a subclass of modality as a separate category from tense and aspect in both Japanese and Turkish, and their miratives are in relation to evidentiality. 

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