Miracles and mirativity: From lexical it’s a wonder to grammaticalised it’s no wonder in Old English

Abstract

In Present-day English, clausal expressions with a/no/little/etc. + wonder tend to be used as grammatical markers, qualifying the propositions in their scope in terms of mirativity, i.e. as “unexpected” (DELANCEY 2001: 369) as in (1), or “the opposite meaning, .. . lack of surprise” (SIMON-VANDENBERGEN and AIJMER 2007: 37), as in (2) and (3) . These qualifiers originated in different types of multi-clausal patterns in Old English, which have persisted into Presentday English, viz. extraposition, e.g. (1)-(2), and paratactic structures, e.g. (3).