Expressing Surprise A Cross-Linguistic Description of Mirativity

Abstract

As I have argued elsewhere (Mocini 2009; 2011; 2013), emotions play a decisive role in
promotional discourse. The power of logical argument may not be sufficient to
convince customers. For this reason, writers or speakers usually appeal to the
audience’s emotional response to achieve persuasion. Ekman (1999) claims that
surprise is one of the basic universal emotions, and only the basic emotions are the
real emotions.1 Following DeLancey (1997; 2001) and other researchers (Dickinson
2000; Aikhenvald 2004; Peterson 2010, 2013), we use the term mirativity to refer to the
semantic category employed to mark the fact that some information is new or
surprising.