Mirativity as Expressive Meaning: The Case of adiós

Abstract

Abstract The study of mirativity as a semantic-pragmatic concept is the study of the status or expectation of knowledge (DeLancey 2012; Sánchez López 2017). In Spanish, mirativity is expressed by the use of strategies such as intonation, exclamatory sentences, focus fronting, and the use of mirative particles. This paper examines the mirative particle adiós (lit. ‘to god’) in Puerto Rican Spanish. I divide the paper into two parts: first, I examine the structural distribution of adiós and its various mirative values (cf. Aikhenvald 2012); second, I look into several properties of adiós that are characteristic of expressive meaning rather than truth-conditional meaning (cf. Potts 2007). The essential function of adiós is to signal that a proposition-at-hand is new and unexpected information to the speaker. As derived from this mirative value, adiós implicates a speaker-oriented perspective and the speaker’s concomitant surprise. Aside from its mirative role in the sentence, adiós does not alter the truth-value of the sentence. For this reason, the function of Spanish mirative particles is best captured within an expressive account of meaning. As I illustrate in the analysis, the use of adiós, and other mirative particles alike, is consistent with Potts’ (2007) characteristics of expressive content: independence, non-displaceability, descriptive ineffability, and repeatability.